Black Gate

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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Twilight: 2000 takes place in the aftermath of a limited tactical nuclear war during World War III. While the inciting event is over (the use of nuclear weapons), the world is still very much in collapse, so the players are engaged in a game of survival. They are what is left of the US 5th Mechanized Infantry Division, crushed by two Soviet divisions in Poland in the spring of 2000.

The game is one of the few true sandbox games that I have ever encountered. While my Traveller games often had sandbox elements, they were still typically guided by a grand narrative. Twilight: 2000 forgoes even that, for the most part. Casting the players in the roll of trying to make their way in the world. The operating presumption is that they want to return home — aka, the United States. 

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One day a few years ago, my brother casually mentioned how he thought it would be fun to create our own RPG game. After a bit of conversation, I understood this was not an off the cuff remark and found myself excited about the prospect. We had a number of conversations about it. Would we use an existing rule set or setting that allowed others to write content into, or would we create our very own?

We decided to build our own. Neither of us had built a game from scratch, but we have played a lot over the years. I had also house-ruled any number of decisions. For those that do not know, house-ruling in RPGs is when the game master (GM) determines a rule on the fly or establishes a rule for their game that either contravenes or is not covered by the rules themself. This is a common activity for GMs because RPGs cannot cover every single thing a player may want to do.

My brother and I bounced a few ideas around, particularly setting. What kind of game did we want? Without knowing it, we stumbled our way through answering a number of questions in the Power 19. In the early 2000s, among the indie RPG movement, a number of names in that space interacted on The Forge. Folks in the indie RPG game community — for example, Ron Edwards the creator of Sorcerer — discussed game design.

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