27 Jan 2001 0900H. Fayette County, Pennsylvania.

In the needle-in-a-haystack search for not one, but two, government caches, the Fire Knights made contact with the militia group known as Alli’s Rangers.

Any other time, the Fire Knights – obviously connected with the feds – could expect a frosty welcome from the insular inhabitants of the post-apocalypse Allegheny Range. But the locals in the mountain communities had problems of their own.

A particularly talented and dangerous marauder leader, known only as “White Death”, had stitched together a confederation of gangs known as the Allegheny Warlords. The Warlords held sway over vast numbers of refugees scratching a living from the ruins of Pittsburgh and its suburbs.

With strength came organization. Marauder bands ruled the camps from which they had come with ruthless efficiency. Crimes within the camps were tried, and offenders summarily shot. Local communities and villages were incorporated into the nearest camp, the residents’ homes and property “appropriated” by “reapportionment committees” and distributed among the refugees and their leaders. Camps warred
with one another in raid and counterraid as individual marauder leaders and self-styled “warlords” struggled for supremacy over broader and broader areas. The incessant bloodletting might have broken the power of the marauder bands had not one leader hit upon an idea to unite the warring bands into a single force.

When intercamp raids threatened the stability and productivity of the marauders’ rule, however, the White Death swerved suddenly and unexpectedly in the direction of civilization. Jeremy Fitzpatrick, a former U.S. congressman from western Pennsylvania, offered at least the shadow of legitimacy to a government which was all but imaginary. The largest of the marauder bands was led by a former congressman; that band must somehow represent the vestiges of legitimate government. Marauder leaders too proud to yield to another marauder leader found it easier to join this imagined government. The Allegheny Warlords grew in numbers until fully 80 percent of the independent marauder bands in the western counties followed the standard of Jeremy Fitzpatrick. And behind Fitzpatrick was the White Death, now in the background but still very much in control.

Now in January 2001, the food is running out, leaving the marauders with a tenuous hold over thousands upon thousands of refugees. Genius that he is, the White Death is still unable to conjure food out of thin air.

Rumors circulate that the communities up in the mountains are sitting on vast stockpiles of food. The White Death casts his albino eye to the Alleghenies…

Back in the Saddle

My last Twilight 2000 post was 21 months ago. I was running out of creative juice for T2000, and drawn to GMing other games, such as:

That last one is significant here. The Blade Runner game is by Free League. We had a blast playing Blade Runner, but I found designing new missions in the police detective investigation genre to be difficult, coming up with intricate plots with clues scattered all over, a score of NPCs to interview, plausible dead ends to distract the PCs. That part wasn’t fun for me. (but FL has a new case file coming out, and I’m looking forward to running that)

Anyhow, imagine my delight when I realized that Twilight 2000 4e has much the same rules as Blade Runner. There are some changes of course; T2000 4e is more tactical in nature. But the learning curve was shortened.

Part of my T2000 burnout was from growing frustration with the v2.2 rules. Oh they served alright, and did so admirably for years, but immersion-breaking issues with the rules kept annoying me (one example: Initiative 6 and above PCs are in a god-tier all of their own. They shoot first, and twice as often as anybody else). At one point, I tried running the campaign under the Savage Worlds ruleset, but it proved to be an awkward fit, and more trouble than it was worth.

In my reading through the 4e rules, I loved its return to 1st edition’s Coolness Under Fire, but with solid Suppression rules to provoke those CUF rolls. Now you have a Twilight 2000 game that more closely emulates the real world light infantry SOP of the 4 F’s: Find em, Fix em, Fight em, Finish em. The SAWs and GPMGs in 4e play a pivotal role in pinning down the enemy, while sending flankers to take ’em out.

Back to the tabletop: Now that my brother is living nearby, and my boys and I go over there for game night, I’m leaning into old school tabletop play. No longer dependent on VTT and screens, the computers get put away.

Handouts for last night’s session

One of the takeaways I had from Blade Runner was Lots of Handouts!

I refreshed my brother and middle son with a summary of events leading up to the current mission:

One drawback of tabletop play for you, Dear Reader, is that I’ll have fewer of those handy images I grab from our Roll20 games.

Also, I’m definitely going to be less productive than before. Twilight 2000 will be just one of several games I’m running. But a Trickle is better than Zero, yes?

Skirmish

Last night, I ran a simple combat to help us learn the rules.

I told the team they’d made contact with Alli’s Rangers, one of the militias in the Alleghenies. If they’re going to be tromping all over the countryside, looking for hidden caches, it’d be best to establish cordial relations with the locals.

Cruising around in Black Chevy Suburbans certainly wasn’t going to instill trust with anti-government locals. So Moss’ group was tasked by the Rangers with intercepting and crushing a few of the many probes the White Death has been sending into the hill country. Prove their worth.

Moss’ team detected one of those probes without being detected themselves. Moss had his snipers take Overwatch. Very cool OW rules in 4e: The sniper focuses on one 10m combat hex, and can break initiative order to engage targets in that hex.

But when Moss sent some of his men forward to ambush, they were detected, and the fight began. They outclassed the small, poorly-armed and disciplined marauder band, and quickly rolled them up.

I have a bunch of extra loose Last Battle counters, so I used those, wrote notes on them. It was a great session, and we started to get in the flow of how combat rounds work. This pic is from near the end. Most of the marauder band was dead, with a few prisoners.