ChalkLine's Desiderata

[ChalkLine]

So, ten stragglers of various nationalities got hoovered up in the last scenario and the first thing a player asks is "what are their names?"
Well, the Fantasy Name Generator is here to help you out. It can give you hundreds of names by nationality and language for the real world ranging from Australian Aboriginal names to Zulu names and everything in between.
It also generates tons of other stuff as well, it will generate business names by type, town names and landform names. And it also does lots of fantasy names as well.
A brilliant GM tool and for those players that get stuck on naming their PC, check it out.

[ChalkLine]

This thing's adorable.

Weighing in at a tiny 2,900kg and capable of moving at 55km/h, the XM108 was to have a crew of four gunners and was to be deployed with rapid reaction groups. It could cross mud, snow, swamps and water. It was unfortunately tested well before "Hello Kitty" stickers were available.

It also provided absolutely SFA protection to the tiny crew and carried no ammunition. The 105mm guns were "being phased out in favour of the heavier weight artillery" (didn't happen for another fifty years) and of course the Blue Sky School said they could do anything that was needed, no need for organic weapons.

Twilight 2000 Role:

Added to airborne formations later in the war, the tiny guns outperformed the standard M102 howitzers in the area of recoil trunnion loading meaning they could be deployed on softer ground, but otherwise maintaining the same standard of fire up to the small crew's endurance. Although nothing is said, the standard M102 had a crew of eight gunners so I'm assuming more gunners would turn up on an ammo/support vehicle.

GM Use: Have one of these stoically motor west with a few guys on it if you want artillery stragglers, just for the laughs.

Edit: These little things don't really offer anything the M102 doesn't except it can cross water or soft ground, I'm submitting it because it's cute.

[ChalkLine]

The Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles (FMTV)

Replacing the long-nosed M35 2.5 ton truck and the M809 and M939 5.0 ton trucks, the FMTV is the first line gear for the US army in tactical trucks in the T2K setting.

I wonder, however, if they became a bit like the Soviet experience.
The Soviets had been using the long-nosed Ural 357 trucks since roughly the early Pleistocene Era when they switched over to the KamAZ 4310 series, a similar cab-over design that has gone on to be legendary in Soviet/Russian service and the term "to KAMaz out of here" is now ubiquitous. However it's been strongly disliked by the actual drivers since Afghanistan as an IED or mine detonates directly under the cab. The rough equation (depending a lot on the weapon) is that for every metre away from the blast you quarter the blast effect. The KamAZ developed a nasty reputation as a crew-killer.

So maybe when going through the list you might still take the old clapped-out M35, M809 or M939 after all.

Still, the FMTVs are nice looking trucks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/.../Family_of_Medium_Tactical...
https://en.wikipedia.org/.../M35_ser...C2%BD-ton_6%C3...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M809_s...-ton_6x6_truck
(The M809 page has some great line drawings to help with visualisation of the variants)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M939_s...-ton_6x6_truck

[ChalkLine]

Driver Tasks and Events

Much of Twilight 2000 is going from A to B.
However, due to recent activities the interval tends to be somewhat "modified" by various events. This means that drivers, the unsung heroes of the Twilight games who don't get to man the cool guns, should be doing things to keep their interest high.

Now, this is going to be a very long post. You might want to skip much of it and go to the end bit which will be situations to navigate if you don't want to read the waffle.

I really can't labour the point enough as to just how much the infrastructure of your World War Three is smashed. Yes, there will be some relatively untouched places but on the whole they will be rare. Bombing, artillery, heavy vehicles (those rubber track cleats disappeared in the first year and the soviets never even used them at all) all abuse the infrastructure. Modern buildings are actually rather fragile compared to some of the mediaeval houses you see in The Second World War images and modern buildings have a habit of collapsing into a pile of crap although Eastern European modern buildings were often built with an eye towards survivability in a conflict. However even just neglect can do immense damage to infrastructure as culverts block up, pot holes blow through the road base and stuff falls down dragging other stuff with it, making an awful mess. If you do any damage and then don't fix that damage immediately it's ten times worse within a few months as nature starts trying to make new systems around the heaps of rubble.

The players and the hordes of NPCs are going to insist on driving over this wreckage. Most military vehicles can climb absurd slopes, usually sliding at about 60º, but even they won't be able to get over most wreckage. For instance an MBT usually has only about a just over a metre obstacle clearing height and wheeled vehicles often are less than this. So, how does the GM adjudicate all this?

First off you need to know that it's there. As usual trawling through images of wreckage gives the GM great ideas and tools to use in play. Making up a list beforehand is I'd say essential and I'm going to ask the list members to add more hazards in the comments below so we can create a file the GMs can use. I actually recommend never rolling on tables, they're awful things that break immersion and frequently give silly results but rather craft an adventure using the lists provided.

Now, there's essentially two methods of negotiating a hazard and that's under pressure and not under pressure. This is because when not under pressure the Driver or the Ground Guide can diagnose the hazard(s), evaluate if the vehicle is capable of negotiating it and then developing a strategy for dealing with it. After that it's up to driver skill and the vehicle's capabilities to deal with the hazard. Under pressure simply means there's no time for that and often the driver has no idea there's even a hazard there until the vehicle is in it. They have to rely on skill, experience and the vehicle's innate off-road capability to deal with the problem.

The Ground Guide.
Ground Guides help vehicles of whatever size and loading condition get through hazards by giving instructions to the driver whether they can or cannot sense the environment themselves. Ideally the Ground Guide and the Driver should both have at least 4+ in the same language. From bitter experience I can tell you the Ground Guide and the Driver should ideally have negotiated many smaller obstacles together first before tackling a difficult obstacle together so they understand each other's assessment criteria and it's relation to reality. It is vital that a Ground Guide have vehicle driving experience themselves, sending a non-driver out to assess a hazard is an exercise in futility.

Note that a driver can always get out and go and look at the obstacle themselves, acting as their own ground guide in a sense.
If there is time an obstacle can be diagnosed to ascertain what hidden hazards and features it presents. Succeeding in this task reduces the drive task by one level with GM approval. Of course sometimes no matter how much you check out a problem the essential difficulty still remains.
Diagnose Hazards -
Drive (wheeled) or Drive Tracked): [Task difficulty varies]

Of course, if you have all the time in the world you can actually just bust a gut and make a road over it. broken down small bridges can be filled in with logs, dirt heaped over them and a road made. Sure, it will wash away soon but you'll be gone. Similarly, craters can be filled in, rubble cleared away and so on.
Mitigate Hazard -
Civil Engineering or Combat Engineering

Finally, there are composite hazards/obstacles. These may need several rolls to get past. The GM should require a diagnose, engineering and drive roll for each one.

A short list of actual hazards for your trip away:
(Important note: Hazards are often observed by the enemy and covered by their fire or used as IED/mine locations.
A note in Attribute Only tasks: multiply all Attributes by 1.5, rounding up)

- A small bridge has been demolished/collapsed creating a "V"-shaped gap about a truck-length long.
The ground on each side is soft. A tracked vehicle requires an average task to negotiate the soft banks, failure means it cannot get across. A catastrophic failure results in it getting bogged.
Wheeled vehicles require engineering assistance to fill the gap. Even with the gap filled the task is still hazardous as the filling material can shift, sliding the vehicle into the gully on one side of the ruined bridge. Note that very long vehicles such as the HEMMT are at a bonus due to their trench-crossing ability due to their long wheel base.
Task: To fill the gap
Civil Engineering or Combat Engineering: Easy [1 period for two personnel to cut material, transport material and place it. For every extra two personnel halve the time to a minimum of one hour]

- A small bridge has been demolished/collapsed creating a "V"-shaped gap about a truck-length long. The centre of the bridge has been filled in with logs and dirt.
The same as above but the work has already been done by someone else. However the in-fill might have already started to shift and the driving task is slightly higher.

- The road is heavily cratered by a heavy artillery/bombing strike.
This is only of importance if the players can't get around it such as in a street or some other choke point.
This is a composite task. There are several hazards in a row and the ground guide is quite exposed moving through them, finding the best path. Note that you can get serious problems with this simple hazard as a vehicle gets far in before bogging and then the extraction vehicle bogs trying to get in to remove the first vehicle.

- A bridge or causeway about fifty metres long is flooded.
Downstream there is a blockage and the watercourse has backed up, making it impossible to see the nature of the structure underneath due to the muddy water. Standard practice is for a ground guide to get soaking wet walking across the flooded structure first. That's right, out there in the open. Pucker up and put on your armour.

- A bridge or causeway about fifty metres long is flooded.
Recent rains have flooded the area, making this a potentially lethal situation that kills hundreds of people each year. The water flowing over the structure occasionally has debris ranging from floating items no bigger than a suitcase up to whole trees moving at high speed, root-ball first and striking like a battering ram. The structure underneath the water has taken serious damage and may or may not be repairable. Whole sections of the sides of the structure are missing in a random pattern and trying to get across blindly will result in going over the downstream side and being swept away or the upstream side and being pinned by the current. This is as deadly as a firefight and many sensible people will simply avoid it and go back the way they came.

Tasks:
To walk across the flooded section
Agility: Average to Difficult

To recover a swept away individual:
Strength: Average
(Swept away individuals have to make a Swimming: Difficult task to avoid drowning rolls. This increases to Formidable if the individual is wearing other than minimal equipment)

Note that all recovery attempts for vehicles will be at a level higher and catastrophic failures result in an individual being swept away if they don not make a swimming check

[ChalkLine]

The KGB
(Russian: Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) "The Committee for State Security".

I see the KGB mentioned a lot and I thought I'd define who they are and what they do in the Twilight War to clear a few things up.

First up, the KGB is a counter-intelligence military organisation. They are separate from the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) and the SSV (the Soviet Ground Forces). Regardless of what they did in peacetime they have two primary functions in war time; defeat domestic espionage and to succeed in foreign espionage. This will take the form of two main operations, the first being hunting down and capturing foreign agents in the USSR and the second is to maintain intelligence webs in enemy countries and to carry out acts of sabotage.

As you can see, they have no place on the battlefield. About the only time you might encounter them would be in either a NATO-held Canton or in Kraków and even then they would be loathe to be found out. For the KGB their secrecy is their armour, they depend on it to survive.

The KGB does not hunt spies in other Warsaw Pact nations, they have the native intelligence organisations do that instead. They do maintain a liaison officer in each branch and are part of any Warsaw Pact intelligence command chain. Very little is known how this command structure worked but they seemed to have had a dual-reporting system where they let other nations do their thing but had to be kept in the loop.

Sabotage units do not liaise with special forces units such as Spetsnaz. Instead they create their own cells of saboteurs that source equipment through deniable channels to create confusion in the enemy. For instance it is likely that a saboteur operating in the USA would be American and armed with US equipment.

All the other stuff, the military intelligence operations you'd see in Europe, is done by the GRU. If you have the (frankly silly) "Division Cuba" in your campaign then all the spook stuff should be done by GRU officers and their attendant Spetsnaz.

[ChalkLine]

The MVD.
(Russian: Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del) Ministry of Internal Affairs

Probably one of the most important formations in Twilight 2000 and one that is totally neglected. The MVD is a parallel military organisation to the SSV and is a defining feature of Leninist Communist countries; it is a militarised umbrella organisation that includes not only internal security troops but firemen, paramedics and police. There is considered no distinction between these and other groups. In European terminology it is a Gendarmerie and it is the parallel to the Polish TKO. In US terms they have a separate identity and a Corp d' Esprit similar to the situation with the USMC in contrast to the US Army.

The reason MVD troops are so important to the game is that they act in concert with similar Warsaw Pact organisations to provide rear area security, ie; the area the players are in.
Unlike the Polish TKO the MVD was a behemoth that had over one and a half million men under arms. These troops aren't second rate warriors, they are specialists that not only secure rear areas from stragglers, provide disaster relief and wipe out special forces but they also act as a ready reserve to deal with penetrations of main force units as well as fight on the front lines. One of their specialties is urban warfare. To do so they are heavily armed but have an emphasis on fast movement and independent action.

For a TOE you can use standard USSR Motor Rifle Division for the Field Units (the ones the players will encounter) but generally with a smaller armour contingent. The MVD also do prisoner control, both civil and military, and so on being the police force. The MVD was essentially broken into three parts, the Police Force that stays in the USSR, the Logistics units and the Field Units. Note that the MVD rigorously maintains a separate chain of command to the SSV and this means that the MVD is not going to be drained off to fill up depleted army divisions. However they do fight in front line situations as well, having fought in all the conflicts of the USSR up to and including the 2nd Chechen War.

The MVD had unique uniforms with their own particular camouflage patterns and are often easily distinguished from main force SSV troops. MVD troops used a variety of specialist weapons such as the OTs-02 Kiparis SMG, OTs-14 Groza bullpup, OTs-20 Gnom revolver and many more. I can actually trawl up all their unique ironmongery if people are interested.
The MVD had several Spetsnaz groups of their own and these may well figure in the campaign, however most of these will have suffered massive attrition and others had a policing orientation similar to elite SWAT groups that would probably keep them in the USSR.

I have mentioned elsewhere the MVD “did not get on well with the KGB”. To give you an insight into this situation in the early 1980s some MVD officers and enlisted men hunted down and murdered a KGB officer in the Moscow Metro, as they were the police it’s unsurprising that no one is was never charged for this crime and the reason for why the man was killed is unknown to this day.

The MVD in the Twilight War.
While some of the MVD is going to be on the Oder Line holding back the “capitalist imperialists” they are also going to be behind the lines and controlling the population, providing what disaster relief they can and dealing with stragglers (ie: player characters). The USSR was quite sensitive to how their troops operated after the fiasco of the Prussian Campaign in the latter Second World War and preferred that their troops acted as back up to local internal troops, in this Poland this is the TKO. However it is likely that the TKO would have suffered massive casualties fighting for their homeland so it is equally likely that MVD units will instead have the local surviving TKO contingent attached and who are the primary interaction with the locals.
The MVD is going to secure the web of supply lines leading back to what is left of the USSR. As the strikes were quite limited there will a degree of industrial capacity, the USSR having a far more dispersed logistics network, and as this is a communist group of nations the military will be given the bulk of that capacity and the civilians will get what’s left. Note that while the situation is bad in the USSR a lot of cooperation can be gained over the civilian population by loudly supplying the troops and like everything in a communist country these operations have to have a political/ideological component. From these logistics centres the MVD will range out and try to exert control over the devastated areas. The players will encounter them holding checkpoints, involved in disaster relief operations, guarding logistics routes, maintaining communications relay outposts, engaged in bandit and partisan suppression and of course hunting down NATO stragglers.

[ChalkLine]

OTO Melara Mod 56 Pack Howitzer

This old soldier served in several nations before being put into storage and in fact remains there in many European nations. In the Twilight War it's in the armouries of Britain, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Spain and it still soldiers on with the Greek and Italian armies to this day.

It's a pack howitzer meaning that it can be broken down into sections for transportation and to overcome obstacles by loading up squaddies and making them hump it over the intervening barrier. It's 1,290 kg weight breaks into 12 sub-sections and it's such a little gun that it can be towed by a Jeep or Land Rover. You can even pop the wheels off and fit it into the back of an M113.

This is almost a field gun, an obsolete class of weapon that equally mixes direct and indirect fire capabilities. The weapon has an asymmetrical axle meaning once in place you can lower the gun for a smaller silhouette or leave it at its normal height for indirect fire. Its little stubby barrel means it hasn't got the range of the longer howitzers but it can pop up anywhere due to its mobility. However it's not suitable for long fire missions due to its light construction, it works best as a shoot-and-scoot gun. It fires the standard US type M1 ammunition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTO_Melara_Mod_56
http://www.pmulcahy.com/towed_guns/i...owed_guns.html