TWILIGHT 2000 RPG MANUAL
TWILIGHT 2000 RPG PLUS

Irish readers, how do you feel about being a sub-category of 'Britain'? Your selection confers one or two language skills from a list of more than 30.

TWILIGHT 2000 RPG PLUS

For the U.S.S.R., you get 18 sub-options: one for each of the 16 republics plus Chuvash and Tartar. If you select Canada, Britain, Czechoslovakia, or U.S.S.R., you then choose the character's regional or cultural origin for instance, Anglo-Canadian or French-Canadian for Canada. Then you choose a nationality from 9 options: Britain, Canada, Germany, Denmark, the United States, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia (they used to be one country, kids!), and the U.S.S.R. You start with a name and sex and then select a portrait from 15 choices for each sex.

TWILIGHT 2000 RPG MANUAL

Manual generation takes a long time and includes options I can't imagine a CRPG of even today's complexity making full use of. You can start with less than 20, but you end up with less equipment and a chance that someone won't have that one skill that you really need, so there's no major advantage. I've got a couple of combat heavies called 'Matrix' and 'Dutch' and an engineer named 'Kaylee.' The rest I auto-generated and just gave alphabetical names. 'Brown,' the farmer, has all the rural and industrial skills: horsemanship, farming, fishing, foraging, and so forth. Thus, 'Cagney' the ex-cop has skills with things like pistols, interrogation, persuasion, observation, forgery, and tracking. With no way to keep track of so many characters, I based them (and named them) on common archetypes. I manually created 8 characters, each favoring a particular set of skills, including at least one weapon. The manual says that it bolds the ones that are useful in the game, but half of those are on the list that were 'removed' according to the errata, and the one skill that the errata says is essential, interrogation, is not bolded. I suspect most will turn out to be useless. Skills include expected things like heavy weapons, rifles, medical, interrogation, lockpicking, computers, stealth, and a variety of different types of aircraft and vehicles but they also include such esoteric selections as geology, metallurgy, SCUBA, forgery, farming, fishing, and knowledge of any of a couple dozen languages. There are six attributes-strength, education, constitution, charisma, agility, and intelligence-each of which governs 6 to 12 skills. As with MegaTraveller 2, I think the developers intended that the computer version could be used to create tabletop characters. With my anticipation thus dampened, I went into the very long character creation process. Or, at least, they're present during character creation. One of them makes it clear that the only necessary skill in the game is 'interrogation.' But I don't know how well to trust that because it also lists 16 skills that 'have been removed from the game,' and those skills are still, in fact, in the game. If that isn't enough, the 'readme' file that comes with the game documents another 10-12 pages of errata. The errata file makes it clear that 'Interrogation' is the only necessary skill in the game. The changes include the removal of equipment, skills, combat options, and sometimes entire interface screens. The warning bells start with the game manual, in which 25 of the 106 pages consist of errata-changes to the game made after the first 81 pages were written. This is just the sort of game that, based on the description, I'd be very excited to play-if I didn't already have plenty of experience with Paragon's attempts to make anything fun out of one of GDW's properties. From this party, you'll assemble squads of 4 to go out on various missions, strengthening the overall party and improving your home base, before taking on Czarny himself. The way the manual describes it, you create 20 characters, each with a unique background and set of skills, drawn from dozens of possibilities. But the developers chose it, and approximated realistic geography, instead of setting the game in a more familiar place like Germany or Italy, and players probably picked up a few things about the nation while playing. If you knew anything about it, it was a) that it had been invaded by Hitler, and b) the Pope came from there. In the pre-Internet era of 1991, Poland was a far-off, barely-understood nation that kids made jokes about without having the faintest idea why. I want to pause here and note how odd this main quest is from an American perspective (and, of course, Americans made up the bulk of those who purchased this game). The player commands a party of 20 (!) rogue military veterans who come together in Krakow to support the city and oppose Czarny. One such fiefdom is in northern Poland, where an evil ex-police official named Baron Czarny has come to power with the support of his Black Legion.

Twilight 2000 rpg