Twilight: 2000’s New Dawn

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.

The Arcane Top 50 – Where Are They Now?

Arcane, a short-lived British tabletop gaming magazine from Future Publishing which ran from December 1995 to June 1997, is a name to conjure by for many gamers of around my age. I came to the hobby after White Dwarf had become a Games Workshop in-house advertising platform, and just as Dragon was on the verge of dropping its coverage of non-TSR RPGs altogether; that meant I got a brief taster of TSR having a broader scope of coverage, and missed out on the golden age of White Dwarf altogether.

With other RPG-focused gaming magazines available in the UK either consisting of patchy US imports or a few local magazines published on a decidedly variable basis (whatever did happen to ol’ Valkyrie?), the arrival of Arcane was immensely welcome. Sure, even by this early stage the Internet was already becoming an incomparable source of both homebrewed material and cutting-edge RPG news, but much of that was in the form of Usenet and forum discussions of variable quality or ASCII text files. To get something which was informative, read well, and looked nice, print media was still just about where it was at.

Truth be told, taking a look back at Arcane in more recent years I’m less impressed than I was at the time. It took largely the same approach to its own subject matter (primarily RPGs, with some secondary consideration to CCGs – because they were so hot at the time they really couldn’t be ignored – and perhaps a light sniff of board game content) that Future’s videogame magazines took to theirs, particularly the lighter-hearted PC Gamer/Amiga Power side of things rather than the likes of, say, Edge. That meant it focused more on brief news snippets, reviews, and fairly entry-level articles on subjects than it did on offering much in the way of in-depth treatment of matters.

From Ronin To Radiation…

Postapocalyptic tabletop RPGs are a small but notable niche subgenre, with their influence perhaps most felt via Fallout – which, whilst a CRPG, was very much developed with a tabletop game fan’s sensibilities (right down to the designers originally planning to use GURPS as the underlying system before their agreement with Steve Jackson Games fell through). The forefather of them all is, of course, Gamma World – but Gamma World tends much more towards the sillier end of the postapocalyptic setting spectrum, with very unrealistic, borderline cartoonish mutations being very much the order of the day.

As such, the first clutch of games to come out following Gamma World all seem to have positioned themselves to try and offer a more serious-minded approach to the subject matter – and interestingly, they all have different ideas as to how long after the initial civilisational collapse the game should be set in. 1980’s The Morrow Project followed Gamma World in setting itself a comparably long time after the big kill; the specific conceit of the game is that PCs are all volunteers in the titular continuity-of-civilisation project, cryogenically frozen when it looked like things were about to go to shit with the intention of being thawed out after a reasonable time period had passed so that they could take the lead on rebuilding, only for the cryogenics computers to malfunction and leave them frozen for 150 years.

The major difference between this setup and Gamma World is that whilst Gamma World PCs are way too young to have any personal memories of the time before (and chances are their communities have little to no institutional memory of it), The Morrow Project presents you with PCs who only know the world before, who are able to explore and make discoveries about the postapocalyptic world whilst making full use of the technological knowhow they’ve retained, are perfectly placed to exploit any remaining technological caches they can uncover, and are tasked with restoring order and imposing their values on a hostile present day. (In some respects it can come across as a sort of time-hopping colonialism…)

Twilight: 2000, by comparison, took the opposite tack by presenting a setting in which civilisation collapsed under the weight of Too Much War within the past few years. All the player characters are not only assumed to have lived through the downfall (and therefore have vivid memories of the way things used to be), but are also among the last representatives of the pre-downfall US Army. The events of the Twilight War have been intensely disruptive – but not enough time has passed to cause people to forget that things used to be better, or the values that held sway before the war, and so when the PCs swing by to help a community rebuild it feels a bit less like colonialism and a bit more like humanitarian intervention. (Unless your PCs go bandit, of course…)

In between Twilight: 2000 and The Morrow Project, both in terms of assumed IC time period and in terms of publication date, is 1981’s Aftermath! by Paul Hume and Bob Charrette. This was a game originally prepared for publication by Phoenix Games, who’d also republished Hume and Charrette’s Bushido after its original publisher folded; however, Phoenix went bust in early 1981. Luckily, Fantasy Games Unlimited’s Scott Bizar stepped in to rescue Hume and Charrette’s two RPGs, making them part of the FGU catalogue and, I suspect, substantially increasing the extent of their distribution in the meantime. (The FGU edition of Bushido is easily the most widely-available version on the second hand market, after all.)

When the Lights Go Out All Over Europe

The Price of Freedom, weird little oddity that it is, was designed in many respects as a response to the first edition of Twilight: 2000. Both games have some important parallels: they both attempt realistic takes at a somewhat fanciful political/military scenario, said scenario setting up the assumed starting point of play for the player characters, and said scenario also making it necessary for characters to take a survivalist attitude.

This is a bit of a niche model for running an RPG, but equally it’s not altogether surprising that someone should have looked to Twilight: 2000 to see if they could mimic its success. For make no mistake about it: the first edition of the game was a huge hit. Marc Miller’s Far Future Enterprises, inheritor of the GDW legacy, offer some evidence for this: their guide to the product line includes, amongst a wealth of useful data, figures on how many of each product were printed, which tends to track reasonably closely to sales levels (since products which did not sell did not require so much in the way of reprints). The core set of 1st edition Twilight: 2000 had some 97,518 copies produced.

This is incredibly healthy by tabletop RPG standards – it’s not D&D levels, but very few games reach that order of magnitude, and by comparison GDW produced just shy of 250,000 copies of the Classic Traveller core rules when you add the various different formats they sold them on. When you consider that Traveller was the top-flight science fiction RPG of the era until it was eventually overthrown by Cyberpunk and Star Wars, it’s clear that there’s strong evidence for the contention that Twilight: 2000 was the market leader in the military RPG niche – and to a large extent it was that niche, with more or less no other attempt at a military or postapocalyptic tabletop RPG approaching its success.