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.

Horvath’s Hoard

Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground was penned by enthusiastic RPG collector Stu Horvath as an outgrowth of his other work documenting vintage RPGs, which began with a humble Instagram account and now takes in a weekly podcast. It’s a handsomely-presented coffee table book, offering a sort of tabletop RPG equivalent of A History of the World In 100 Objects in which Horvath goes over his extensive personal collection and picks out RPG books to discuss – core rules primarily, but supplements, adventures, campaign settings, and less easily categorised items also feature.

Rather than simply offering a run-down of Horvath’s favourites, Horvath attempts to select items which help illustrate something about the tabletop gaming zeitgeist. If a game is historically significant or extremely influential, that counts for a lot, but Horvath also allows himself to include a few items which represent noteworthy oddities, intriguing creative dead ends, or outright screwups, because as in other creative fields infamous failures can be just as illustrative as celebrated successes. In addition, Horvath sticks to items from his own collection – he won’t include something he hasn’t heard of, or has not at least at some point owned and been able to make his own assessment of.

In this respect the biggest gap, as he acknowledges in the introduction, are RPGs in languages other than English; I don’t know whether or not Stu is multilingual, but presumably if he was multilingual enough to read and appreciate RPGs written in other languages, he’d have included some here, so this is really a tour through the Anglophone segment of the hobby; we get only second-hand glimpses, via translations, into areas like the Swedish scene, and nothing on Germany or Japan, all territories where games other than D&D rule the roost.

Like Dice In Rain

The first releases in Free League’s Blade Runner RPG – the core rules and the starter set – are now out, and what’s immediately obvious when you look at the material is that they’ve really hit a high bar when it comes to the production values here. I’d been favourably impressed with their execution of the second edition of The One Ring, I’ve heard good stuff about their other games, and they’ve kept up the high standards here. The core rulebook and the starter set look gorgeous, fit the aesthetic of the movies nicely without being reliant on screenshots from the films (indeed, the illustrations all look to be original, bespoke art made for the game), and are also laid out very nicely and usefully for the purposes of actual play.

The concept of the game is simple: it’s an investigative RPG, you are either a human or a replicant working the Blade Runner beat in 2037 LA, your official task is to track down and “retire” renegade replicants and investigate other replicant-connected crimes, but of course the investigations you get into will throw up ethical quandaries and emotional entanglements which might force you to choose between the departmental rulebook and your personal morality.

This is the sort of thing which if executed thoughtlessly could end up being kind of distasteful – the sort of copaganda we really need less of. Both the original movie and Blade Runner 2049, however, avoided that fate by taking a specifically dystopian route, making it clear that the work of the bounty hunters is a dehumanising process, and the bounty hunters exist in a grim and corrupt system, and the violence unleashed by the replicants is a matter of self-defence against a world intent on destroying them.