Thanks to buying into a Bundle of Holding a while back, I’ve ended up with a cluster of Free League PDFs, and I’ve just gotten around to taking a look at their new version of Twilight: 2000 – the game’s 4th Edition. As I noted in my review of Twilight: 2000 1st Edition, the most widely-known versions of the game were put out by GDW; the original 1st Edition boxed set was a startlingly good seller for them, outstripping sales of the roughly contemporary MegaTraveller boxed set with ease. Their 2nd Edition started out strong, but they managed to confuse the market with a rapid patch to a “2.2” edition, as part of a perhaps misguided impulse to try and convert all of their RPGs to their house system. (The same drive saw the creation of Traveller: The New Era, kicking off one of the earliest truly nasty edition wars in the hobby.)
After the shuttering of GDW in the mid-1990s, Traveller creator Marc Miller and his Far Future Enterprises became the curators of the GDW legacy, producing reprint material here and issuing licenses for new games there. In 2006, 93 Games Studio announced that they’d be putting out Twilight: 2013, a third edition of the game with a tweaked timeline (due to the passage of time making the old one anachronistic); a PDF limped out in late 2008, print products followed, but then they swiftly shuttered in 2010.
That’s hardly likely to be the case with Free League – or if it happens, it probably won’t be Twilight: 2000 that does for them. They seem to be going from strength to strength, they have a series of widely celebrated game lines under their belts, their Kickstarters are operating smoothly, and they didn’t touch Twilight: 2000 before they were already fairly well-established as a publisher. It’s an apt subject for them to kick on – with games like Mutant: Year Zero, they’ve already proved their chops at the post-apocalyptic genre, after all.
On top of that, the folks at Free League are gamers like the rest of us; according to the designer’s notes in this edition, the brainwave to actually go for the licence came about because some of the key people there ended up running a Twilight: 2000 1st Edition campaign, with the action shifted from Poland to their native Sweden, and had such a blast that they realised that they could apply lessons learned from Mutant: Year Zero and its very similar “open-world survival simulation” approach to Twilight: 2000. After checking in with Marc Miller to secure the licence, they ran a Kickstarter, and this new edition is the result.
I’ve only got the PDF, but the physical product is very much based around the 1st Edition, with a boxed set containing booklets, maps, and whatnot. That’s purposeful, because this edition is very much a root-and-branch update of the approach of the 1st Edition. Rather than continuing past editions’ doomed attempts to write a future timeline that doesn’t become redundant within a few years of publication (Twilight: 2013 perhaps being the nadir of this, what with the headline date being a mere 5 years after publication), they’ve gone the alternate history route, setting the game in a timeline where the 1991 coup in the Soviet Union against Gorbachev worked, the plotters also neutralised Yeltsin, and without anyone else to mobilise opposition the Soviet Union went onto a regressive path rolling back the Gorbachev-era reforms and peace overtures.
This all leads into a Twilight War broadly along the lines of that described in the original game – where nuclear exchanges take out the industrial infrastructure of the Cold War belligerents and a futile land war in Europe continues for a time until it sputters to a halt due to the aching lack of supplies and orders from home. (The chilling last words from the high command to US forces in Poland – “Good luck. You’re on your own now” – becomes something of a tagline for this edition.)
This back-to-basics approach is well-chosen. Over the span of the 1st Edition and 2nd Editions of the game, an increasing focus on military minutiae made for a ratcheting-up of the crunch and an intensification of the military focus of the core rules – indeed, GDW would also put out Merc 2000, an adaptation of the 2nd Edition rules for modern-day mercenary action without the nuclear war aspect. Free League instead are taking the game in a very different direction – and in doing so, tease out themes which were very much there in the original boxed set, but went astray later on.
This is summed up in the player’s booklet here, which emphasises early on that “Twilight: 2000 is not a game about the military. It’s a game about survivors.” Casting the PCs as primarily military (by default, though in this edition that is not mandatory) is a means of starting them out with what semblance of supplies and a support structure is left after the Twilight War, which provides narrative justification for them roving around the countryside doing whatever it is the campaign’s focusing on (finding an island of comparative civilisation and working on protecting and nourishing it, taking out bandits and defending the weak, getting home, whatever) rather than just hunkering down in place and living a subsistence existence. At the same time, ample support is provided for playing law enforcement, civilians, escaped prisoners, intelligence officers, and so on – the military is still the assumed centre of gravity, but Free League have recognised the premise of the game offers ample scope for non-military characters to join the bands of survivors.
Rather than port over the 1st Edition system, Free League have decided to do a full changeover to the Year Zero system, though useful guidelines are provided for porting the old material over to the new system. This is a clever move; if you want a somewhat zanier version of the post-apocalypse than standard, it makes it easy to fold in ideas from Mutant: Year Zero, or throw in a force of invading xenomorphs from Alien, or work in the enigmatic abandoned technologies of Tales From the Loop in order to get a Stalker-like experience. Had the game been published continuously from 1984 to now, this might be more annoying, but as it stands it has had enough fallow period, and seen enough full retoolings, that one more retooling doesn’t really damage anything, and whilst the old system was fine it is showing its age a bit; Year Zero is modern, quick to grasp, and has a proven track record with this sort of game, so it’s a logical rules set to use.
There’s also a treasury of support material in here, with two distinct campaign frameworks supported in the core rules – the original Poland default starting point from 1st Edition, and a new one based in Sweden, presumably arising from the material from Free League’s home Twilight: 2000 campaign. Even more excitingly, there’s a really robust set of tools for doing low-prep open-world exploration, with a range of NPCs, locations, encounters, and other randomisable material provided to the referee. Despite the emphasis on a broadly (but not fussily) realistic approach to the setting, it feels like it would be really easy to pick this up and start playing very quickly. On the players’ side, two distinct character generation systems are provided – one based on quick archetypes which allow you to arrive at a balanced character in a hurry, or a random lifepath system which generates a rich backstory for you provided you’re willing to accept more randomness and less finely-tuned balance.
It was always a little surprising that 1st Edition Twilight: 2000 was such a hot seller, given that the original boxed set was actually presenting a pretty finely-tuned and slightly niche concept – “US military unit stuck in Poland after World War III devolves into a miserable stalemate” is very much what that box supported better than anything else. With a wider range of post-apocalyptic RPG available these days – including Free League’s own Mutant: Year Zero, the celebrated Apocalypse World, and the generationally-based Legacy: Life Among the Ruins – there’s perhaps less room for Twilight: 2000 to be the big beast of the subgenre that it used to be. Calibrating the new edition to this very particular concept, on the other hand, as well as finding interesting ways to add variety to it whilst still keeping the basic concept intact, feels like the best way for the game to find its own distinct way in the current market. There’s plenty of other choices for games like this out there, and if one of those suits your needs better this isn’t going to upstage them – but if you want Twilight: 2000 specifically, this might be the best version yet.
Refereeing and Reflection 