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Title: Twilight: 2000, 2nd edition: Roleplaying in the Devastation of World War III by Frank Chadwick, Dell Harris, Loren Wiseman, Julia Martin ISBN: 1-55878-070-X Publisher: Game Designers Workshop Pub. Date: August, 1990 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: The best military role playing game ever written
Comment: "The War has raged for years The high-tech ammo is almost gone. High-tech equipment is failing, piece by piece, with no spares to fix it. The front lines are held by a few grim, desperate soldiers.
"The US 5th Division holds the line in Poland. Now, a Soviet encirclement has cut it off in a province ruled by ambitious warlords, local militias, and bands of marauding deserters. HQ is 200 klicks to the rear and powerless.

"Your last order sets you free...

"Good Luck. You're on your own." ...from the cover

In the mid-Eighties, a bold new role playing game was introduced. Twilight: 2000 was perfect for its time: The Reagan Era, when it seemed that conflict was always around the corner for the United States and the Soviet Union. Conflicts had flared up in numerous places during the Cold War, but Europe was always the presumed scene of Armageddon. The designers went with that assumption, but turned it on its head.

"When we first published Twilight: 2000 in 1984, we suggested that a general European war might come not from a Soviet invasion of Europe, but rather from Soviet preoccupation elsewhere [a war with China] coupled with sudden German reunification. While the prospect of German reunification appeared to be a fantasy at the time (and many critics singled it out as a particularly unrealistic aspect of the game), by the time the original second edition was published German Unification was imminent, and it has since become a reality." ...Designer's Notes

Indeed, the game was always running from its shadow. World events tortured the T2 timeline. By the time the second edition was introduced in 1990, the face of Europe had changed, and the Soviet Union was marching into history. The 2nd edition -- blessed with a much-needed re-writing of the rules -- attempted to repair the timeline. But the book had scarcely made it to the publisher, when events had already made the new timeline obsolete. This problem was permanently solved in the 2.2 edition (1993), by fixing a "departure point" from our world's history, a tactic used in the alternate history novels by Harry Turtledove and others. In 1995, as the world was going to war in the game, GDW went out of business.

Twilight: 2000 is far from obsolete. Some fascinating campaign examples show the versatility of the rules system:

A traditional Europe campaign using the 2.2 timeline

Travelling through post-holocaust America... "Howling Wilderness"

A non-WWIII game using the 2nd edition sourcebook Merc: 2000 and additional background from the Millennium's End game.

A historical campaign set during World War II or enmeshed in the Spanish Conquest of the New World.

Wayne Gralian
Wayne's World of Books / Krakow RPGs