ChalkLine's Desiderata

[ChalkLine]

What changes have you made to your game?

I went for a radical change to a more lethal system, but I also noted a few things that I personally didn't like too much about the standard game:
(Please note the following is simply personal preference)

- An over emphasis on special forces by many players.
I think this is frankly because players know 'skills = survival' and playing a spec ops gets you those skills.
To change this I just gave out a skill total that was the same for everyone and players got to choose whatever skills they liked within reason. I also made it clear that after four years alive in world war three the PCs were now as skilled as any special forces operator even if they were a lowly private in an infantry section.

- The ranks seem too high.
I've been in many a game where there are multiple colonels and sergeant majors. It just seemed silly even with the rapid advancement.
The campaigns I ran we did without rank tables and just had nearly everyone a private, one or two corporals and a sergeant plus one LT. This actually had a strange development where the privates became the main social group.

Typing this out I suddenly realised that I may have been heavily influenced by movies like Cross of Iron and Kelly's Heroes.

[ChalkLine]

Missions outside the perimeter for canton troops:

- Basic Patrols
Intelligence is vital and clearing patrols stop OPFOR from making positions outside the perimeter. Things spotted from the lookout positions need someone to go and check them out such as smoke columns and various sounds such as gunfire or screams for example.

- Salvage and Upkeep.
The perimeter is never strong enough and forays into the hinterland for barbed wire from old positions, recovered land mines (who wants that job?!), bunker materials and similar can be scavenged from spots the patrols find. Similarly fuel, even something as simple as wood for heating and stills, can be hunted up. Food is a constant requirement and intel from patrols or friendly civvies and stragglers might develop locations for these. Vehicle wrecks are great resources that need specialised missions to recover.

- Anti-Battery Missions.
Nothing sucks more than being mortared for days on end. Missions to deal with OPFOR indirect fire observers and artillery units or to place your own observers in position might be common place. From simple elimination to destroy-and-seizure missions to grab equipment such as weapons, position materials, radios and so on can be developed.
When under indirect fire attack most cantonal tasks can't be accomplished. Exposed equipment might be destroyed (a good way to keep your PCs lean and hungry and thus ready to go out and adventure).

[ChalkLine]

Here's an article on what food would be available in a Nuclear Winter.

It prompts a lot of questions and the thing about the Twilight War is that it always postulated a 'friendly nuclear war' that wasn't overly destructive. In fact every T2K campaign I've been in on reflection the damage to the fabric of the world probably wasn't as bad as the Second World War and never as bad as The First World War (there's places in northern France that are so contaminated by chemicals from gasses and explosives from The First World War that they kill 95% of plants and are so toxic they probably can't be entered for another 700 years by unprotected people)

However a true Nuclear Winter is a really terrifying setting. A general exchange would probably stop most sunlight reaching the surface of the earth and survivors have about two to three years to get to the equatorial areas and set up enough infrastructure to exist. A campaign set on this isn't just getting back to friendly territory but transiting a whole section of a global hemisphere.
It also is a lot harsher in every respect. Everyone left behind is going to starve or die of exposure. Food supplies are going to rapidly exhausted in that short window of transit because the very next crop is going to fail after the exchange, and its going to fail on a global scale and keep on failing. Players are not going to be able to comparably comfortably wait out the winter months in a canton but instead are going to have to keep moving as the cold starts to set in around the polar latitudes and then move. Endless darkness from the nuclear clouds will make the going tough. Most people will simply psychologically fail and die, unable to move. In fact most surviving people may be even unaware that they have to move towards the equator and this will doom them.

It definitely makes for a different game in every sense. The article says that a general exchange between just India and Pakistan is probably enough to trigger the Nuclear Winter, an exchange between the WTO and NATO is more than enough to do so, even one that only uses a fraction of the combined arsenal.

The biggest problem once the players get moving may just be starting. A general mass movement in an equatorial direction will overwhelm every society on the planet, both those moving and those already at the equators. Players may well need to fight the whole way and the fight for space once they're there and finally fight again against others arriving.

[ChalkLine]

I was just watching a video on Viet Nam and came across an interesting thing that relates a bit to the Twilight War.
(Note that this does not cover every area and time but is simply a broad generalisation.)

After about '68 the Viet Cong (not the NVA) switched tactics. Prior to this they'd been fighting large unit actions and encounters would be in the nature of battles that might run up to days of combat. However the preponderance of US firepower meant that this was a losing proposition. While some of the hard-fought battles might cause large US losses in some cases usually they'd inevitably lose more men and materiel the VC couldn't afford. After '68 they shifted to ambushes to fight an attritional war where combat rarely took longer than ten minutes. Before the US troops could marshal their support the VC would simply withdraw.

This had a strange effect on infantry fighting in that it totally destroyed any ability to manouevre. The US troops would go to ground, call in airstrikes or artillery and then by the time they'd got that sorted the fighting was over. The infantry rarely shifted position from when they'd first been hit. In the vast majority of cases the skilled US infantry didn't flank, didn't suppress and envelope or any of the advanced infantry fighting they'd been taught. They just shot back until the shells landed and then cautiously went over to see if they'd hit anyone. It was a major paradigm shift in combat and many of the soldiers had to relearn the fighting they had to do.

Now, to get to Twilight 2000.
This major shift in tactics will probably happen quite a few times and at varying times in different places. A GM who wanted to have different areas of the war fighting different types of fighting could do so. For instance, during The Siege of Warsaw you might see positional fighting with trenches, barbed wire, mines and artillery duels much like in The Second World War at The Siege of Sevastopol. In my campaign the siege is unsuccessful and NATO never gets into the city but if they did then you shift to the awful 'rattenkrieg' ('rat war') of Stalingrad where there's no armour to be seen and you can fight for days for three rooms of a ruined building while the civilians huddle in the basement. However on the river banks of the Vistula there might be the Mekong Delta hit-and-run tactics mentioned above and between there and the Oder on the plains you might see vehicle manouevre warfare with sweeping movements of mobile mechanised units.
Player characters moving between areas should be confronted with new types of fighting suited to the tactical realities of the areas. Trying to add flavour this way I think would start to differentiate between player backgrounds and experiences. One player might be a survivor of the trenches, another a brown water patroller and yet another a cavalry soldier as an example.

I don't recommend penalising players for being 'out of area' but I do recommend giving players a bonus for a specialty. A point on their initiative and cool for being in a combat situation they're (undoubtedly unwillingly) accustomed to might give a nice touch of difference.

Also this means that players can specialise in something they do quite a lot and the GM can promote their area of expertise. The specialist character might get Idea Rolls to come up with a helpful tactic if they're stuck ('You remember at Warsaw you crawled through a land drain and came out behind the enemy in a similar situation'). I'd use this cautiously as players resent the GM steering their players, it can make them feel a bit like a passenger in the game. But if they don't know what 'mouse-holing' is or what a flank sweep is then I can't see the harm with the GM providing an option.

[ChalkLine]

Here's the description of my armoured train from my campaign for you to use or abuse.

[ChalkLine]

Here's a simple encounter driven scenario that might cover one or two sessions. It's nothing special and is written to be able to slot into any campaign. There's no NPC stats or maps as it's very generic.
On the whole it's here simply to round out a campaign or when you're stuck for ideas one night

[ChalkLine]

While not a standard Twilight 2000 game, I've been doing a bit of wikipedia reading and the idea of various military 'advisers' stranded deep in Africa in the 1990s and trying to fight their way out has suddenly appealed to me.

The premise is that some former troops are contacted by their respective governments to act as advisers for a rebel group in a fictional country and try and overthrow the current government. Once on the ground they realise that the intel they've been given is totally wrong and the situation is far more complex than they were briefed. After a bit of scene setting where they start to realise that they're probably not on the side of the angels (obviously there simply isn't any in this situation) a factional struggle kills the rebel group's leaders and the new leaders have other backers. As this is post-Glasnost I'd probably pick some other nation than Russia as 'bad guys', probably a fictional one as regional governments often fostered rebel groups in each other's territory. (Liberia was infamous for this).

A loyal soldier gets them a warning that the new rebel leadership has targeted them for arrest. Some of the group will be executed as a spectacle and the rest extradited to the rebel's backers for intel. The executed will probably be the lucky ones as the backer's methods of interrogation are similar to those of Idi Amin's.

In true T2K fashion the advisers have to get to an extraction zone with plenty of betrayal and conflict as well as the possibility of using their skills to do what they consider is correct on the way as they're no longer considered 'employed'. Behind them and pushing the plot is a horde of various factions in technicals displaying various levels of the brutality that marked the regional conflicts of that era.

The players start in a situation much like the end of the 5th ID; grabbing whoever and whatever they can and beating feet. The infrastructure in front of them is destroyed by the war and they may even end up cooking fuel.
Worse they may now be seen as something of a liability by their own backers; the shadowy organisations that put them in theatre. How this develops would depend on the plot.

Of course all is not lost. There was some very good people in the area in that time and they might be able to help out. However it would inevitably be a tangled situation as these helpful groups or individuals tried to liaise with each other to provide help or guidance.

[Edit] I actually started researching background for this and the setting was so awful and depressing I simply abandoned it.