Black Gate

Degenesis Rebirth is an RPG that keeps calling me. It’s an ear worm of the imagination. The developer, SIXMOREVODKA, has launched a fabulous website that features an interactive map, timeline, stories, audio clips, and more. It is as rich and in-depth as the books themselves and also, like the digital copies of the game, all free. The world is so rich, in fact, that one struggles at times to deal with it all.

Degenesis Rebirth is a post post-apocalyptic game. In 2073, Earth was bombarded by a number of asteroids that was as close to an extinction event without quite doing the human species in. The people of this world call the event the Eshaton. For hundreds of years, humanity struggled with the new reality and sudden shifts in the world. The game focuses on Europe and North Africa, so we know that the plummet in temperatures set off another ice age. The drop in sea levels cut the Mediterranean off from the Atlantic. The Adriatic Sea between Italy and Croatia largely disappeared. The Sahara has bloomed with vegetation and life.

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When Traveller first released in 1977, it did not have an official setting. This quickly changed with the introduction of the Third Imperium, a large, multi-star system empire. While alien species like the Hivers, Droyne, Aslan, Vargr, and K’Kree — out of many — are prominent features in many Traveller campaigns, the fact is that the Imperium is human dominated. And the Imperium’s two major foes, the Solomani Confederation and the Zhodani Consulate, are human dominated.

Part of the setting’s lore is that the so-called Ancients took humans from Earth and seeded them throughout what is called Charted Space. Often, the humans have been altered radically for the environments. Cafadans, Darmine, Darrian, and others were either altered by the Ancients or adapted to their environments and managed to survive after the Ancients destroyed themselves in a cataclysmic war.

The Zhodani, however, occupy a special place in the Traveller setting. While transplanted by the Ancients, they discovered the faster-than-light jump drive on their own accord. More importantly, they are the only human society that incorporated psionics into their culture and government. This has had a profound effect on them and on the Imperial perception of them when the two civilizations clashed in the Spinward Marches, a designated area of space.

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My nostalgic roleplaying game (rpg) is Middle-Earth Role Playing (MERP). That’s not a good one to bring to a table of what I term “casual” gamers. Casual gamers are the kinds who say, “Tell me what dice to roll?” MERP requires a level of energy and investment that leaks away while the GM performs all the calculations and looks up all the results on various tables. As one of my gamers tellingly noted, a few years ago when I was struggling to run it for a passive group, “Gabe’s apparently playing his own private game over there as we sit here waiting patiently for results.”

I’m not blaming the game, of course. This is the unavoidable result of this kind of game coupled with certain players. But I didn’t give up on this game until the player characters (PCs) randomly encountered a Wyvern. “Oh, man,” I chuckled, “this is going to be dangerous for you guys.” Well, it wasn’t. A lucky first hit Stunned my monster. Whether the effect lasted for one Round or eight really didn’t matter, because those PCs circled it and protracted that effect by wailing on it, as if they were those guys in Office Space, surrounding and battering at an office copier.

This is what we call being stun-locked, a known “problem” in Rolemaster systems. When it happened in my MERP group, I told my players, “I don’t think I want to play this anymore.”

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This is Part III of a detailed review of The Polish Campaign, a 6-part adventure sequence published by GDW in 1985 for their Twilight 2000 role playing game. The campaign covers Escape from Kalisz, The Free City of Krakow, Pirates of the Vistula, The Ruins of Warsaw, The Black Madonna, and Going Home. Part I, which looks at The Free City of Krakow and touches upon Escape from Kalisz, is here. Part II, which looks at Pirates of the Vistula and The Ruins of Warsaw, is here.

Twilight: 2000’s Polish campaign is iconic in the world of RPGs for providing supplements and adventures that fit its sandbox emphasis. Many RPGs rely on set adventures with expected scenes and outcomes, and many game masters (GMs) use those preset stories. While this is all well and good (nothing wrong with it), most GM plans do not survive contact with the players.

Sandbox games flip the script. What do the players want to do? The GM then reacts to this, often relying on random encounter tables. However, pure sandbox play can pose problems around ongoing interest. Humans like stories because they have beginnings, middles, and endings. The Polish campaign proved extraordinarily successful at negotiating the balance. The books are not pure adventure nor pure sourcebook.

The Black Madonna is, perhaps, the most famous supplement. So popular is it that Free League added a revision by the original author, Frank Frey, as a Kickstarter digital stretch goal for their forthcoming edition of Twilight: 2000. It is interestingly within the campaign the one that seems “out of sequence.” The previous supplements, Pirates of the Vistula and The Ruins of Warsaw, provided numerous incentives to the players to make their way from Krakow to Warsaw. The Black Madonna’s primary area of operations is northwest of Krakow and in Silesia.

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