Black Gate

For Black Gate, I spent much of 2021 re-visiting Twilight: 2000‘s first edition adventures and sourcebooks. Twilight: 2000, published by GDW in the mid 1980s, absorbed into its setting much of the worries and fears of the late Cold War — but turned it into a game. The Soviet Union and China begin a war that eventually brings in the rest of the world. While the war is starts out as conventional, the temptation to use tactical nuclear weapons cannot be held back. The world inches across into nuclear Armageddon.

While Twilight: 2000 was not unique in suggesting a nuclear apocalypse, it did have a compelling twist that differentiated it from things like Mad Max or By Dawn’s Early Light: it happens in the immediate aftermath. Armageddon is happening — society is breaking down. National governments like the US or USSR exercise very little control. Environmental devastation is in the early stages. Yet people continue to live. Some even continue to fight the war. Most try to simply survive.

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Hades (Supergiant Games, 2021)

When I looked at the list of Hugo winners this past week, I was thrilled to see one of my favorite video games had won for Best Video Game.

(And then I froze and said, “Wait, there’s a Hugo for video games??” Answer: yes! This was the first year an award was given for Best Video Game, and it was proposed as a special award category. The last two years have seen a sharp rise in the video game market as first time gamers and previously casual gamers suddenly found themselves with a lot more time and a need for both entertainment and a new way to connect with others. Hopefully, this will be established as a continuing award category for the WSFS, but time will tell.)

Hades, developed and published by Supergiant Games, now carries the honor of being either the first or the sole winner of this category, and it solidly deserves it. Is it the best game in the last twenty years? No. There are bigger, grander, more ambitious games out there. Dragon Age comes to mind (Origins or Inquisition, anyway), as do Skyrim and Call of Duty. But with that conceded, Hades is absolutely a worthy Hugo-bearer. Why?

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In this journey exploring the Twilight: 2000’s first edition adventures and supplements, we have two remaining items (other than the supplements of weapons and vehicles) that address the state of the United States and United Kingdom. Both are supplemental releases that allow players and referees (gamemasters) to conduct adventures and campaigns.

The Survivor’s Guide to the United Kingdom is the only official supplement by the late GDW that covers the isles. And the situation is not good in the old country.

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In the RPG by GDW released in 1984, Twilight: 2000, the action starts in Europe, specifically Poland. The players, members of the US Army’s 5th Mechanized Division, find themselves stranded in enemy territory when the last major offensive of World War III flounders and then implodes. The world inched across the line of nuclear holocaust. The American, Soviet, German, and Polish governments are hardly worthy of the name “government.”

The adventures and setting information that GDW published in subsequent releases favor heavily game play in Eastern Europe and then the war-shattered United States. While excursions to Greece and Norway are to be found, for the most part, players wander Poland, Czechoslovakia, and perhaps Ukraine in an effort to simply survive and find a way home — even if that is making a new home.

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The Gaean Reach and The Gaean Reach Gazetteer (Pelgrane Press, 2014). Covers by Chris Huth

The great Jack Vance doesn’t get a lot of love from role players. Despite his huge influence on the field (Gygax based the fundamental cast-and-forget spellcasting system of Dungeons and Dragons on the Vancian magic system the author developed for his Dying Earth tales, just as an example), there aren’t a lot of ways to use dice to explore the wonderful worlds Vance created.

Twenty years ago Pelgrane Press released The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game by Robin D. Laws, which went a long to rectifying this artistic injustice. More recently Laws and Pelgrane Press took the versatile Gumshoe System, designed for running investigative games like Trail of Cthulhu and Ashen Stars, and used it as the basis for The Gaean Reach, a science fiction RPG set in the lusciously detailed setting for much of Vance’s best science fiction, including The Demon Princes novels, the Cadwal Chronicles, the Alastor Cluster trilogy, and the Ports of Call novels.

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Player and gamemasters (GMs) of tabletop roleplaying games often refer to “crunch.” This is in reference to how the mechanics of the game work, and generally (though I suspect some folks will fight me on this), a crunchier game has more context-based rules. For example, the least crunchiest game is someone roles a 20-sided die and no matter what, if it rolls above 10, it is always a success. You start adding crunch to it when the rules start to say, “okay, not modify that roll by +2 for attempting to break a grapple or -1 if doing the task in the dark.” Games can get crunchy in a whole lot of ways (lots of rules for various situations–looking at you Starfinder). Some go way crunchy (an example of an extreme crunchy game is Dystopia 23, see my article here).

In the early 2000s, games tended to get more complex and crunchier and a “movement” referred to as the OSR, or old-school revival (sometimes old-school renaissance), crept into the tabletop gaming community. Originally hearkening back to the supposed simpler days of tabletop RPGs in the early 70s (okay, the early days of Dungeons & Dragons), the movement’s core can best be summed up in “rulings over rules.”

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