A Twilight 2000 retrospective

Twilight 2000 is a game that I don't think I could ever play the way it was written. I simply can't keep the rules in my head, frankly. But it holds a place in my gaming heart simply because of the atmosphere, like nothing else I've ever read.

For those who haven't encountered it before, Twilight 2000 is a (very, very) 1980s RPG set in the closing stages of World War III. The nuclear exchanges happened three years ago, but the war didn't end. Days before the campaign begins, the last major American force-in-being in Europe launched a final offensive into Poland; it failed, and now the team are trapped behind enemy lines in a disintegrating world of marauders, ex-military bandits, Warsaw Pact survivors and worse.

Twilight 2000 is a post apocalyptic game, but it has very little in common with Gamma World or Atomic Highway or my personal favourite Other Dust. There are no mutants, no muscle cars (unless you count Humvees), no monsters that aren't human. In fact, you can't really call it post apocalyptic. The apocalypse is ongoing; it's present apocalyptic. When I first encountered the game I was put off by the procedural setting generation and the procedural encounter systems - now, after exposure to OSR, they fascinate me.