Twilight Nightmares

[Frank Frey]

Greetings,

After watching the theatrical trailer for the "Predators" movie, I went and dug out my copy of the "Twilight Nightmares" module. IMO, it's very well done. Usable for both T2K and Merc 2K. How about the rest of you folks? Did you like it or not like it.
Also, have any of you ever included any weirdness in any of your T2K games?

Out Here,
Frank Frey

[Matt Wiser]

Never did use Twilight Nightmares, but the GM we had for our CSU Fresno group thought about doing an adventure based on the Roswell UFO crash-only this time set in Iran, with both NATO and Soviet troops racing to find whatever they can, including a survivor! Even if the combatants found only wreckage and bodies, they'd be eager to use any ET tech to help rebuild. And if there's a survivor to help out (willing or otherwise)...that was the premise. We never did it, because two of the group graduated before it could be played-and that GM was one of 'em.

[Targan]

I used ideas from Twilight Nightmares but never ran any of the actual acenarios. And yes, my last T2K campaign included quite a lot of weirdness - alien artifacts, supernatural events, French super-soldier cloning experiments and other stuff. I've learned to talk very sparingly about that side of my campaign as many T2K purists seem to be offended by it.

[Legbreaker]

Offended? I can't see why? It was YOUR game after all...

I've run a couple of the scenarios from Twilight Nightmares myself including the Predator copy. It was enjoyed by all even though they picked the background material in the first five seconds and acted accordingly.

[Frank Frey]

Originally Posted by Targan

I used ideas from Twilight Nightmares but never ran any of the actual acenarios. And yes, my last T2K campaign included quite a lot of weirdness - alien artifacts, supernatural events, French super-soldier cloning experiments and other stuff. I've learned to talk very sparingly about that side of my campaign as many T2K purists seem to be offended by it.

Sounds like a rockin' great campaign to me, dude. I'd love to hear more about it.

Out Here,
Frank Frey

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Originally Posted by Targan

I used ideas from Twilight Nightmares but never ran any of the actual acenarios. And yes, my last T2K campaign included quite a lot of weirdness - alien artifacts, supernatural events, French super-soldier cloning experiments and other stuff. I've learned to talk very sparingly about that side of my campaign as many T2K purists seem to be offended by it.

I read a bit about your campaign on the earlier Twilight: 2000 forum, I don't believe it was a case of people being offended by the campaign.
It was more a case of you mentioned that the campaign caused you issues with depression and you found it difficult to reconcile the player's essentially selfish/evil nature during the game. The one player who could have been helping you deal with this seems to have been the one who caused most of the issues.
People offered advice on how to take back control of your campaign but it appears that nothing was done to actually do so. People learned to stop offering advice

[kato13]

Originally Posted by Targan

I've learned to talk very sparingly about that side of my campaign as many T2K purists seem to be offended by it.

It is a shame if anyone feels that way about presenting any information or concepts. I think the "blanket" was very interesting, and I have even created a back story for it in my future games base on it coming through the stargate program.

There are lots of elements discussed here which I probably would use in my T2k games, but I would never want someone not to post them simply because I was not interested in that aspect of someone's game.

This board is not for any one single person, it is an information exchange. So I guess my general comment to anyone, who has an issue with something that is posted, is that unless you are going to be constructive, hold your tongue and simply move on to the next post.

[General Pain]

Originally Posted by Targan

I used ideas from Twilight Nightmares but never ran any of the actual acenarios. And yes, my last T2K campaign included quite a lot of weirdness - alien artifacts, supernatural events, French super-soldier cloning experiments and other stuff. I've learned to talk very sparingly about that side of my campaign as many T2K purists seem to be offended by it.

Well I for one would love to read page upon page of Targan Madness.....

So please go on...in great detail

[General Pain]

Originally Posted by Frank Frey

Greetings,

After watching the theatrical trailer for the "Predators" movie, I went and dug out my copy of the "Twilight Nightmares" module. IMO, it's very well done. Usable for both T2K and Merc 2K. How about the rest of you folks? Did you like it or not like it.
Also, have any of you ever included any weirdness in any of your T2K games?

Out Here,
Frank Frey

Weirdness in campaigns...HQs (forum poster) T2K campaign has involved
-alternative religions
-voodoo
-experimental government experiments
-aliens
-and the list goes on...but I'd rather he tell about it though.

In my own MERC campaign (seperate forum here @ juhlin) the pc's has encountered quite a few things that many would call far fetched or just plain impossible...I really can't tell much though ; since the campaign is kind of young and allmost all the players are regulars here....



....but there will be more weirdness...

[Jason Weiser]

I thoroughly enjoyed the adventures with S'Daru (hope I got the name right) and the aliens who implanted the humans in the Philippines. The last one I ran...and man were the players freaked out...half of them wanted to hole up in the sticks somewhere and wait for what they thought was the inevitable alien invasion.....

I also ran Black Madonna once with some supernatural elements, such as basically making what was left of the Jansa Gora be a sort of dimensional gate with Filpiowicz being something of a magically enhanced fellow who could soak up a lot of bullets...but he wasn't un-killable.(I was running Twilight 2000 as a alternate world in the GURPS 4th ed Infinite Worlds milleu, sadly, that part floundered..it seemed many of the group was very anti-military (NYC at the height of the Iraq war). Also, there were dimension hopping Nazis who made a deal with the scumbag brute in SSD-1109 (His name escapes me at the moment) and they kill off the rest of the team for a chance to grab the Madonna for themselves.

[headquarters]

I have the modules , and they have been inspirational althoughj I have not played them per se.

As for GP s comments about irregularities in our T2K campaign -
-alternative religions NO COMMENT
-voodoo UNCONFIRMED
-experimental government experiments NO EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT THIS CLAIM
-aliens HEARSAY
-and the list goes on I DONT RECALL...
but I'd rather he tell about it though I TAKE THE 5th

Targan - the evilness of your players sound like a common theme in campaigns were the party gets the upper hand -i.e run a cantonment and have some power etc .Mine certainly went off the narrow path so to say and waged war on eachothers units,imprisonment,assassinations attempts and actual murder and all sorts of bad violent behaviour. NPCs were abused in more horrible ways.

My advice is short : Death stops the mouth of any troublesome PC.

I dont mean to force your will all the time-just let the baddies face the statistical results .X number of killings leads to x number of vendettas -and play all those firefights out with increasing ingenuety from the attackers.
And of course-dont be shy to use WMDs.

( pen and paper style folks ..pnp..)

[Targan]

Okay, well for those who weren't there right at the beginning when I started talking about my campaign, the central supernatural stuff all had its basis in Harnmaster. There were two reasons for this: firstly my player group and I had previously been playing mostly Harnmaster together back as far as 1989, and secondly the rules system we were using for my T2K campaign was Harnmaster/Gunmaster. In Harmaster the standard metaverse that most campaigns take place in is called the Seven Worlds, they being Terra (standard Earth), Midgaad (Tolkien's Middle Earth), The Blessed Realm (Tolkien's heaven and home of the Valar and the Maiar), Kethira (the planet where the island of Harn is), Sherem (in our campaign Jorune from the RPG Skyrealms of Jorune), Losenor (a solar system whose main habital planet was blasted into an asteroid belt millenia ago) and finally Yashain (the God Plane, a jumbled up mish-mash of a place which isn't really a planet, more of a paranormal realm where strength of will and power of spirit creates local reality and of which Runequest's Glorantha is a part).

The Seven Worlds all exist in different universes, each of which has different physical laws, but are linked together as loose P-variants of each other. At certain points on each of those worlds the walls of reality are thinner (or deliberately weakened) allowing individuals of sufficient knowledge or spiritual/magical/psychic power to cross from one world to another. Terra (our Earth) has the lowest level of what in the simplest terms could be described as "magic" and so it is difficult both to get into and out of compared to the other Seven Worlds. But tens of thousands of years ago a race colloquially known as the Earthmasters rose to great power and travelled between the Seven Worlds, colonising many of them. Their main transport network consisted of what later became known as the Godstones. The majority of the Godstones look just like the Monolith on the moon in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Many of the Godstones on various worlds had protective structures built around them made out of a virtually indestructible substance known as pseudo-stone (which when looked at with extreme magnification can be seen not to be made from any kind of natural matter but in fact is made from billions of tiny black or white monolith-shaped frozen energy packets).

In my T2K campaign the Earth had a number of (I never decided exactly how many but perhaps around a dozen) Godstones scattered across the globe, nearly all hidden underground and completely unknown to human civilization. A few Godstones were known to humans (a couple had been known of by humans for thousands of years) but as Earth-born humans inherently have little psychic or magic potential very few can make the Godstones function. One Godstone in Yugoslavia was discovered by the CIA during the early 1990s as a result of remote scrying experiments conducted as part of the (real life) Project Star Gate. The US Government had only just started to intensively research the nature of the Balkan Godstone when the USSR and China started their fateful conflict. In my campaign part of the reason why CivGov kept pouring reinforcements into the Yugoslavian Theatre during the Twilight War was due to pressure from the CIA to maintain control of the area around where their Godstone was buried.

Just before the war broke out researchers controlled by the CIA/NSA etc discovered that a small number of psychically-talented operatives were able to activate the Godstone and, using strength of will and careful visualisation, were able to open a gate to any location that the could accurately picture in their minds. Some of those individuals were also able to open psychically-locked doors in the ancient facility built around the Godstone, where they discovered a number of ancient alien devices, the functioning of which were all far beyond the understanding of current human science. Some of those devices included what came to be known by the PCs in my campaign as "The Blanket", a 7' x 4' sheet of brownish-grey glossy material which was warm and slightly tacky to the touch and would would, of its own volition, try to wrap itself around any living (or recently living) organic creature which its ancient programming made it believe was injured, genetically flawed or even dead and try to heal/repair it. Unfortunately "The Blanket" had not had any preventative maintenance performed on it in thousands of years and was dangerously prone to malfunctioning. Instead of using up its available charge and becoming dormant until re-powered in the way it was intended, "The Blanket" would sometimes when it was low on charge completely consume what/whoever was wrapped in it, leaving no matter at all behind. In consuming its patient/victim it would become fully recharged (the PCs learned to tell the difference, as "The Blanket" would be glossy and active when charged and dull and torpid when in need of charge).

Quite a few of the artifacts recovered from the Balkans site were sent with a psychic operative through the Godstone with the intention of returning them to CivGov control in the CONUS during late 1999 but the operative was unable to visualise the intended destination well enough and ended up arriving in the mountains in northern Czechoslovakia. There he and several colleagues who went through the mis-targeted gate with him ended up linking up with other CivGov agents and made their way into southern Poland. That was where they eventually encountered Major Anthony Po, US Army Special Forces and his band of merry psychotics and were relieved both of their lives and of the artifacts. That is how Po came into possession of "The Blanket".

One way or another most of the other paranormal creatures and events in my T2K campaign were directly or indirectly linked to the presence of Godstones scattered around the Earth. If these ramblings have not doused everyone's interest in my campaign's supernatural elements I will post more background to this thread.

[kato13]

Originally Posted by Targan

One way or another most of the other paranormal creatures and events in my T2K campaign were directly or indirectly linked to the presence of Godstones scattered around the Earth. If these ramblings have not doused everyone's interest in my campaign's supernatural elements I will post more background to this thread.

That is interesting. I like the detail on the blanket's appearance and plan to lift that. The Godstones would also be very useful if I ever resurrected my Dark Conspiracy game. I certainly have interest in hearing more.

[Cdnwolf]

WOW!!! Never had any interest in that part of the TWL stories until I read what people have done with it...

CURSE you ...lol... now i have to get it..... another thing to read....lolol

[Legbreaker]

It might not be strictly T2K in the traditional sense, but it's still damn good reading!
Might even give some canonites a few ideas...

[Grimace]

I ran one of the little quick scenarios out of the Twilight Nightmares book. I had put my players through the Black Madonna adventure and have made it with a darker tint, so there was just enough unease in them when we finished up that adventure that the Twilight Nightmare adventure of "Seeing is Believing".

I worked it straight from the book, as they had taken refuge in an abandoned farmhouse. The wind picked up as the night set in. They had built a small fire to keep warm and they decided the night's watch schedule. I made them roll for alertness and to see if they stayed awake normally, so when I did it this time they didn't think anything of it. I didn't even let the player who's character was on watch know when he had fallen asleep.

Rather than being in Oregon, it was in war torn Poland.

The man on "watch" spotted the red flashlights. Then they heard the sounds from the back of the house. Then the footsteps on the front porch. The sounds of rifles chambering rounds.

Then the Night Creepers began to come in! Bullets were flying everywhere. Grenades were thrown, bodies were racking up! My players racked up quite a body count before they were finally put down...one at a time, until they were all dead. They fought like it was their own skin they were trying to protect, rather than just their characters. Then, as the last person was shot several times and was lying on the ground as a pair of Night Creepers appeared over him and started to smash him with their rifle butts, all of the PCs woke up!

It was morning. Everyone was alive. Their weapons were intact, as were all of their ammo. What?! yelled my players. A dream. It was all just a dream...it had to be. After they had convinced themselves that's what it was, they gathered their belongings and set out, only to find a red lensed flashlight out on the front porch. Bwa ha ha! I've never seen my group so motivated to move along to another place, well away from that farmhouse.

It was a thumb's up game for me. I had a lot of fun, and I'm pretty sure my players liked it after they got over the creepy nature of the whole thing. But that's all I've ever done with Twilight Nightmares. I've wanted to do others...specifically the dinosaurs, but I never had the opportunity. Maybe I could work it into a one-shot one of these days.

[Legbreaker]

Out of all the scenarios, that one has got to be my favourite. It may be a simple stand up and shoot until you run out of ammo, but damn, isn't it great fun for a GM?

[Marc]

Great reading, Targan. As Kato said, there are some good ideas for Dark Conspiracy. I would like to read more about it.

About Twilight Nightmares, one of my players gave me the book some times ago. I've opened it thousand of times and, though I've used some of the ideas or maps, I've only run one of the adventures. I suppose that I find that some of the plots are not much original. One of my main problems with one of the groups the players is their incredible background in sci-fi books and movies. They have lost their innocence when talking about that matters . Any new campaing is a true brain squeeze for me.

[firewalker]

DeaconR had some good weirdness in his stuff i remember the jersey devil particular.

a while (at lest one forum ago) back he was talking about doing a game where a modern town was shifted to a D&D world i always wanted to know how that turned out.

[weswood]

I've got an adventure planned out on an island. The background is that thousands of years ago an alien spaceship was doing expolration duties, picking up flora and fauna from worlds that were inhabitable to them. The ship crash landed on earth, with the remnants of the crew fleeing the ship in fear of radiation. Some of the captured specimens escape and flourish on the jungle island. The alien technology of the ship keeps the island from being discovered by modern man.

The aliens (I'm going to use AD&D drow, an evil black skinned race of elves), along with a few slaves of different alien races, make it to a peninsula and wall it off from the rest of the island for safety. A colony is built and within the colony are several races of aliens, some stone age humans who were the island's original inhabitants, and a few more modern humans. There is a plant on the island the primitave humans discovered that stops aging, so some of the humans are 1600's pirates, Civil War soldiers, WWII era pilots thought loast at sea, and a few modern shipwreck survivors.

Along come the players in a wooden sailing ship. (I've got the adventure planned right before Gateway to the Spanish Main) They're hit by a storm, maybe a hurricane depending on the time of the year and are shipwrecked. The ship lands in a cove surrounded by steep hills with a rocky beach. The PCs will be sent out searching for food, fresh water, and trees suitable for repairing a large hole in the ship's hull and replacing two masts. The only place on the island where trees long and straight enoug for masts are in the valley made by the crashing spaceship.

I'm using mostly AD&D creatures on the island (no magic though) with a sprinkling of historical dreatures such as a saber tooth tiger or two,and a herd of small wooly mamoths


Sometimes I think it's an exercise in futility as I don't have any players locally.

[Targan]

Sounds like a fun adventure. One question though... why would there be woolly mammoths on a jungle island? Wouldn't jungle suggest a tropical or semi-tropical climate. I think the poor mammoths would die out in one generation, maybe two. Elephants on the other hand... Asian elephants love jungle.

[pmulcahy11b]

Originally Posted by Targan

Sounds like a fun adventure. One question though... why would there be woolly mammoths on a jungle island? Wouldn't jungle suggest a tropical or semi-tropical climate. I think the poor mammoths would die out in one generation, maybe two. Elephants on the other hand... Asian elephants love jungle.

There is an island off California where there were mammoths (or mastodons?). They migrated there while the island was still connected to the mainland during the Ice Age; as the Ice Age ended and the island became an island, the group there became pygmy mammoths, to the point that they were only about the size of buffaloes. So Weswood's island could have mammoths -- they'd just be smaller.

Of course, the population of mammoths on that island eventually died out due to depletion of resources and a small breeding population, so maybe not...

[weswood]

Originally Posted by Targan

Sounds like a fun adventure. One question though... why would there be woolly mammoths on a jungle island? Wouldn't jungle suggest a tropical or semi-tropical climate. I think the poor mammoths would die out in one generation, maybe two. Elephants on the other hand... Asian elephants love jungle.

Mainly i wanted some large extinct mammals for the saber toothes (or saber teeth???) to hunt. From what little research I did, there was a typs of wolly mamoths that lived in forest type areas.

[Targan]

Originally Posted by weswood

Mainly i wanted some large extinct mammals for the saber toothes (or saber teeth???) to hunt. From what little research I did, there was a typs of wolly mamoths that lived in forest type areas.

The need for large game for the sabre tooths to hunt makes sense. If the island was forested like, say, Pitcairn Island maybe you could have some kind of pygmy forest mammoth. But not mammoths with woolly fur designed for ice age conditions. And probably not in the jungle. Unless the the mammoths had independently invented air conditioning. How about something from the deer family, or really big wild pig-type things. Or how about a species of large flightless bird like the Moa or the roc aka Aepyornis. Both those species almost survived into the modern age, and the moa lived on remote islands (New Zealand).

[pmulcahy11b]

Originally Posted by Targan

Or how about a species of large flightless bird like the Moa or the roc aka Aepyornis. Both those species almost survived into the modern age, and the moa lived on remote islands (New Zealand).

And it also has the virtue that for a time, after the Dinosaur Age, that the large flightless birds were the apex predators of the world.

[weswood]

I think I like the large pig things. Huge snorting beasts with razor sharp tusks. Thanks for the idea.

[copeab]

Originally Posted by weswood

I think I like the large pig things. Huge snorting beasts with razor sharp tusks. Thanks for the idea.

Hogzilla?

[copeab]

Originally Posted by weswood

I've got an adventure planned out on an island.

I use Caprona as part of a mini-campaign set in the closing stages of WWII, relocated to the North Atlantic. I said the island was hidden because it was an Atlantean refuge/lab, although apparently abandoned by them for a very long time.

Although part of a different Burrough's setting, I always liked the mahar (psychic flying dinosaurs).

[Targan]

Originally Posted by weswood

I think I like the large pig things. Huge snorting beasts with razor sharp tusks. Thanks for the idea.

The largest eagles that ever lived, the Haast's Eagle was native to New Zealand and hunted among other things the Moa. Imagine a flying predator that size coming at you!

[waiting4something]

Originally Posted by Targan

The largest eagles that ever lived, the Haast's Eagle was native to New Zealand and hunted among other things the Moa. Imagine a flying predator that size coming at you!

Sounds like a mythical thunder bird to me. Some people believe thunder birds still exist, just like Nessy.