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My first encounter with Twilight: 2000's universe came from something that I like to call The Score, which marked the first - and almost only - time that I found RPG material at a garage sale. During my teenage years, I would bike throughout my neighborhood looking for garage sales, and then see if they had anything game-related for sale. My ratio of finding stuff to not finding stuff was approximately 100:1. I shared my grandfather's love of garage sales, but could never find what I was looking for.

But then, there was the Score. Dropped by a garage sale, poked around - and then saw a pile of role-playing games lying on a table. Twilight: 2000, Ghostbusters: The RPG, and a copy of AD&D Oriental Adventures. I had enough money to grab Ghostbusters, which was one of the best purchases I ever made period, and Twilight: 2000.

Twilight: 2000 was published in 1984, right in the middle of the Cold War and during a period when game companies were branching out from Tolkienesque fantasy as a standard template; you could comfortably group Paranoia, TOON, Ghostbusters, and Call of Cthulhu together as its sibling games.

In order to ensure that the game's focus remained tightly around a specific band of American soldiers, Twilight: 2000 assumed that you were specifically the remants of the American Army as it broke up in the last battle of World War III; your unit was released from the American army's chain of command and told that it was on its own. From there, it was pretty much up to the players to decide what they wanted to do - attempt to free the area from local bandits or Soviet domination, set up a fiefdom of their own, or just try to get back to America. It was a sandbox game, before the days of White Wolf's influence. If you were stuck for ideas - and I guarantee that I probably would have been - there were a number of adventures and/or campaigns written to usher the PCs back to America. (Initially, I regarded this as a flaw caused by the early days of role-playing, but came to see it as a stroke of genius as I wrote this review.)

I never got a chance to playtest the original version of Twilght: 2000, but I can attest to the fact that its character creation system followed a system almost exactly like doing your taxes. You would follow a worksheet, starting with random attributes, then going down a checklist of different secondary attributes derived by various mathematical formulae, ranging from how many months you'd spent in battle to how much radiation you'd picked up to how far you could throw a grenade. Once you were done with all of that, your attributes would actually determine what your military rank was - I think that the worse you were in combat, the better your rank was. After you all had your characters, you toted up your combined attributes to see what kind of vehicles you got; the worse your attributes, the better your ride, so as to balance things out for groups who'd offended the dice gods.

Anyways. Twilight: 2000 got ruined by the same thing that ruined just about every post-apocalyptic fictional world: The Soviet Union done collapsed into a kleptocratic turd pile, which then allowed the rest of the world to stop worrying that they were going to wake up as radioactive ash if somebody spilled soup on a Soviet ambassador. (I used to live in Grand Forks, North Dakota, the home of most of the United States' nuclear weapons, so I was not unmindful of what was going to happen in the event of a nuclear war.) In 1984, you could easily evoke the cultural jitters of a nuclear holocaust; in 1990-1991, the nuclear boogeyman clattering in your backyard turned out to be some homeless guy going through your trash looking for returnable bottles. Without that tension, you could still do a post-apocalyptic world, but it just didn't have the same feeling of "When the bombs go up, what am I going to do?"

I mention all of this because Twilight: 2000 was, along with The Price of Freedom, a product of its own time. After the Wall came down (and that sentence feels good to type), the fundamental premise of Twilight: 2000 became alternate history rather than a vision of how things could be. There were attempts made to update it with its second edition, but the ship had already sailed and interest in the specific future that Twilight: 2000 offered was gone. (Merc: 2000 was a followup, but didn't have the same resonance.)

So, then, here's Twilight: 2013, the third revision of the game. How does it fare?

The Nutshell: You May Go After This

Here it is in a nutshell: While the system is way too weird, clunky and unproven for me to recommend, and while the setting as described is ludicrous, it's pretty good as a mechanical simulation of a postapocalyptic environment. But you're going to have to like hardcore simulationism in order to get the most out of the game because of how intertwined the rules are with the gameplay.

Get Down With The Thorough

The original setting of Twilight: 2000 was fairly evocative of its time and place because you had the distinct sense that the person writing the last days of the American Army in Poland was a military history wonk. Its focus was primarily on the last days of a particular American military unit, rather than on the meta-details of how things got into the state they were - because if you wanted to know how the Soviet Union and the United States got into it, you had about eighty years worth of history explaining as to how we got to this point. (In fact, I really have to wonder if Twilight: 2000 was specifically aimed at gamers who were serving in the military at the time of the game's publishing, since you could use role-playing to burn a lot of otherwise useless "hurry up and wait" time.) In fact, if you're not a military history buff, the description of the death throes of the American Army is almost painful to read; it's a stew of 5th divisions and 4th Calvary and 43rd Infantry, leading up to "Good luck. You're on your own," from your division's commander.

The problem with an updated version of Twilight: 2000 is that it forces the people writing it to decide what they're trying to do. Are they going to go with a full-scale nuclear war? Limited wars occurring in a decaying society? Mercenaries fighting it out in conflict zones around the world? Fallout-3 style alternative history, complete with mutants and giant ants and what-not?

Twilight: 2013 decides to go with a series of limited nuclear wars, combined with various meltdowns of global order across the globe. Unfortunately for the game, it does so in an unintentionally amusing manner.

Back in the early days of gaming, I got the impression - and this is may be inaccurate - that the people creating and playing the game belonged to a loose social fraternity of intellectual college types, mostly centered in Wisconsin - masters and graduate students, theater types, military historians, English and history majors. Gaming existed as an interesting side hobby, but their primary interest as people was in whatever their chosen field of study was; it was a side effect of college, rather than a phenomenon in its own right. I believe that much of this impression derived from reading Dragon Magazine and just absorbing general game culture.

I think that there's been a distinct decoupling of role-playing from the world around it, combined with a cannibalistic insularity in terms of its culture. If you want to write a supplement about waging fantasy battles, you don't read all of the military history that you can lay hands on and borrow the best elements to inform your supplement; you read a bunch of fantasy novels instead, or you read all of the materials that you can lay hands on about the system that you're going to use, or you read previous supplements about war in a fantasy world. Instead of talking about logistics, and the internal organization of units, you try to simulate another author's take on the subject of war. I got the impression that the people who wrote Twilight: 2000 may have actually served in the armed forces, had learned how to recognize and diagram the movements of a military unit, understood the threat that the Soviet Union posed and how the war in Germany would actually go down. I didn't understand exactly what they were talking about when they wrote about military manuvers, but I understood that they'd had experience and/or education in the field that would inform the rest of the game. Judging from the history of Twilight: 2013, I'm guessing that the author's experience with geopolitics is limited to what he learned in high school.

One problem is that backstories for nuclear wars are almost entirely useless, because it doesn't matter how the world got blown up; only that it got blown up. The best postnuclear backstories - The Road Warrior, Fallout - are the ones that are the briefest. Twilight: 2000 just had Russia and the United States going at it in Germany, which didn't really need a backstory.

In fact, in role-playing, backstories are primarily useless unless they have some direct effect on the characters. The Simarilliion is, in effect, a document much like Henry Darger's ninety-thousand page opus about the Vivian Girls; it's just Tolkien writing to amuse himself, rather than to amuse an audience. (And the fact that he was working with mythology at a doctorate didn't hurt the quality of its writing.)

Global Geopolitics Do Not Work That Way

Let's first address the overall sweep of the alternate history of Twilight: 2013. It starts off with the usual clusterfuck in Iraq, then starts adding on a series of crop famines and climate changes that make the world worse. Then we get into areas that are highly questionable. Pakistan slide into anarchy - okay, that could definitely happen, but I guarantee that every country in the vicinity is going to start putting major pressure on everybody involved to secure their nuclear weapons and get things locked down. (Things seem to happen in a vacuum in this world - nations don't interact with other nations, but suffer calamities on their own.) Then, after a series of tainted shipments, the United States and Europe cut off Chinese manufacturing completely.

Now, my education on what would happen if both the United States and Europe were to suddenly cut their imports from China off completely is derived from Tangency, but the general impression that I've received is that doing this would result in the sort of global economic meltdown that would make our current troubles look like a minor hiccup. I mean, we're talking the fundamental manufacturing engine of the United States going away overnight - the effects would be worldwide and catastrophic. But the history that we're given here suggests that only China is affected, which results in its becoming more militarized, and that Mexico becomes a new manufacturing hub.

There's more. The European Union decides to intervene as the war in Darfur spills over into Chad with 4300 troops, despite the EU having shown no interest in humanitarian intervention as a political unit outside of the UN, and are steadily reinforced over time even after it turns into an Iraq-style quagmire. (This is from a political organization that couldn't stop a war in its own backyard some ten years ago.) Mexico and the United States get pissed off at each other over the deaths of some fifty Mexicans in a shootout between the DEA and a drug cartel at the border, and the two countries close their borders to each other, complete with Americans being beaten up in Mexico and America deporting all illegal immigrants back to Mexico, thereby destroying its huge supply of cheap, affordable labor. South Korea invades North Korea, which promptly surrenders - despite some fifty years of intensive brainwashing by the North Korean government informing them of the South's perfidy, not mentioned in the book - and Korea is bloodlessly reunified.

Then it gets really funny. After a terrorist bomb causes the deaths of some ten thousand people, France - followed by the rest of Europe - cracks down on immigrants and starts mass deportations. Once they find out that the terrorists who bombed them have training camps in Belarus - and I'll save you time here; Belarus is tucked right into the western armpit of Russia - France goes ahead and launches six nuclear weapons to destroy the terrorist training camps. Russia then invades Belarus and launches a nuclear attack of its own on France, on the reasoning that France attacked Belarus - despite the fact that Russia didn't own Belarus at the time. This is like jumping into a bombed-out car and then declaring war on whoever bombed it. France shoots back at Russia, a formula for the instant nuclear annhilation of all of your croissants, but the US shoots down most of their missiles before they can land.

This is what happens when your experience with geopolitics comes primarily from the Wheel of Time and the Sword of Truth series. I'm dead sure, for instance, that the authors of this piece have no idea of what a nuclear weapon actually does, much less the catastrophic impact that a nuclear explosion has - and these are to wipe out terrorist training camps, as opposed to entire cities. I mean, when Chernobyl blew up, the entire European continent had to stop drinking milk for about six weeks. And Russia launching a counterattack? For territory that they didn't own at the time? With nuclear weapons? On a NATO member? It's the result of people who only really know the world through a lens of fan culture. I mean, if you read this alternate history out in any of my political science teachers, they'd be on the floor before too long. Saudi Arabia engaging in open warfare with Iran in Iraq? With what army? Issuing an oil embargo to the United States for supporting Shiites in Iraq, then allowing the US to get oil in exchange for military weaponry? Really? You don't think that maybe the US would - after twice butchering a much larger army that threatened Saudi Arabia in the first place - just go ahead and depose the Saudi regime instead, using its own oil supplies to do it? Especially after Russia and Europe got nuked, and the situation got desperate?

I could go into more detail, but the basic message is clear: The people who are writing this are not professionals. I mean, to be sure, there's nothing wrong with being an enthusiastic amateur, but you would hope that for $40, you won't have a backstory in which nuclear weapons are used like cruise missiles and in which the world's only superpower goes begging for resources that it already has to a nation that it could wipe out overnight. The basic problem is that the world of Twilight: 2000 has already passed. There is no more Soviet Union, there is no threat of a global nuclear war waged between superpowers; if there is going to be a nuclear war in the next fifty years, it'll be between India and Pakistan, and it'll end with both states ceasing to exist. Like, if you're going to rewrite Twilight: 2000, you're going to have to figure out what you're going to do with it now that its central premise has ceased to exist. The creators of Twilight: 2013 came up with an alternate history that doesn't make any sense to anybody.

So, anyways, to round out the alternate history: Europe and Russia both nuked, with Russia invading Europe during the middle of a vicious nuclear winter, Middle East in a gigantic war over the fate of Islam. China launches a surprise nuclear attack on the United States with its submarine fleets - which apparently employ alien space bat technology to avoid detection and destruction by the more numerous and technologically advanced submarines of the US - in retaliation for cutting off trade with China, then uses company-sized teams of covert Special Forces teams to wage guerilla war within the United States. (You can't wage guerilla warfare without having the support of, and the ability to hide within, a civilian populace, by the way.)

Anyways, they're somehow able to destroy the American government's ability to communicate with itself, instead of being instantly lynched by enraged, enradiated mobs of survivors, and make "deep strikes" into the United States by raiding National Guard weapons depots.

Actually, we should add "warfare" to the lists of things that the author doesn't understand. The United States has spent the last fifty years creating elaborate, overlapping systems designed to allow the United States goverment to function in the event of a nuclear war. There's no such thing as a surprise attack in nuclear warfare due to the fact that submarines can be tracked - and are, on a regular basis - and the United States would be well aware of submarines approaching their coast long before an attack could be launched. Even if they were launched, there's still a delay between when it's launched and when it detonates - and that's discounting the magic anti-ballistic missile system that the US seems to have developed in this alternate timeline. Furthermore, the idea that companies of Chinese Special Forces could somehow infiltrate the United States, survive a full-scale nuclear attack and then launch raids on the surrounding countryside is pure science fiction. That's not mentioning how both Canada and Mexico also go to war with the United States, and somehow aren't wiped off the face of the earth.

I could keep going. I mean, at this point, it's an exercise for Tangency: Find a misconception about how the world works within the text, post a detailed explanation of why it's wrong and suggest further reading material for education's sake.

This isn't just nitpicking. Twilight: 2000 was a millitary simulation game; it had its roots firmly buried in the ground of simulation, and the world that it took place in was fairly grounded in the real world, written by people who knew what they were talking about. The opening history that we're being given here is so at odds with the real world that takes Twilight: 2013 out of the category of military simulation and into something else entirely - a kind of alternate history that's slowly dying from the cancer of too many contradictions from the real world. If you buy the game, you're either going to have to buy into its vision of the world of 2013 - which is born from consistent ignorance about global geopolitics - or simply rewind the clock back to 1984, let the missiles fly and strand the PCs near Kalisz.

Anyways. After we've gotten the backstory, we get a look at the world as it exists today - the actual game world that the PCs will inhabit. Thanks to a wide variety of wars, most of humanity now hunkers down into city-states, which act as forts against the various dangers of the post-nuclear world. All of the major land wars have somehow spun down into stalemates, with the United States trying to put itself back together and Europe and Russia locked in a land war that's going nowhere. Britian goes back to being feudal under the existing British monarchy, which is frankly hilarious. Europe is mostly composed of city-states, with various refugee populations shuffling back and forth trying to find someplace safe to live while engaging with dozens of small wars with advancing Russian troops. Iran is fighting with the other nations of the Middle East, Pakistan is gone, India is slowly devolving into what it was some three hundred years ago, and most of Israel has retreated into exile in Egypt. (Don't ask me about how that last one happened.)

China, meanwhile, is busy invading Taiwan, Japan, Myanmar, the Phillipines and Korea at the same time, following Clausewitz's doctrine that the best way to make war is to open twenty-six simultaneous fronts at the same time. I think that he wrote it in his seminal treatise "Me Clausewitz BA-CHOMP BA-CHUY-CHUY CHOMP." A bit of boxed text explains that the Chinese rely on "shock and awe" to establish a foothold with a small invasion force, which forces the US to only focus on one or two targets at a time - except that if they're fighting to liberate Korea and Japan, they're not - well, you get the idea. This was not written by somebody who knew much about war.

The United States is a patchwork of blasted ruins and places where things are relatively normal, but the EMP effect from the nukes has brought everybody down to roughly the same level; meanwhile, the United States government has broken apart into MilGov and CivGov, as the United States military tries to make its way back home to fix things up. There's an underground railroad to funnel Canadians through the United States, down to Mexico, due to anti-Canadian prejudice among Americans - Okay, finish laughing and we'll continue.

Even more unintentionally amusing is the last speech given by the President, which admits outright failure of the federal government to handle the situation (possible), and then completely dissolves the federal goverment and places the military in the control of local governments. I mean, I'm not kidding. He splits the United States into a vast patchwork of warring fiefdoms, each with its own military, on purpose. The level of political naivety displayed here is breathtaking - and shit, you don't need to have the President announce it for the local asshole to decide that he's the next coming of Benedict Arnold and declare himself King of Springfield.

South America feels like a place from a different game, where most of the wars involve drug cartels (whose profits would completely collapse after the destruction of the United States) and a war between Venezeula and Colombia. Brazil is mostly wiped out by the "Oakland Flu", another method of getting the world blown up. Africa devolves into chaos and madness - more so than usual - with only Egypt, Libya, South Africa and a corporate town near the Ivory Coast acting as bright spots. Tribal warlords apparently rule the day, but this doesn't take into account just how easy the AK-47 can make war, or how much wars in that area would change without gasoline and a steady supply of AK-47s and ammunition from the former Soviet Union.

The authors state that they left which areas had been hit by nuclear weapons vague, so that the GM could decide for himself which areas of the United States had been nuked. There's a line, though, between giving the GM room to improvise and simply leaving out details of the setting which need to be stated. I don't have the time to sit down and work out which areas have been nuked to death, which areas are safe and where the fallout clouds will land. Gamers are graying rapidly, and I'm pretty sure that a lot of them don't have the necessary time to world-build when they're working, raising a family, or doing both at the same time. More and more, I begin to wonder if simply leaving a world unbuilt isn't an exercise in giving GMs freedom, but simply refusing to write stuff that needs to be written.

The other problem is the difficulty in nutshelling the setting for the players. Most games have a fairly simple premise at their core - you're a member of a postapocalyptic tribe that's thrown you to the monsters that destroyed humanity, you're a vampire in New York, you're living in one of William Burroughs' more interesting dreams, you're stranded in Poland somewhere.

The focus in the corebook of Twilight: 2013 is so broad that players will have to learn the local politics and history for each potential warzone before they dive in, which may lend a certain feel of "take this test on the history of the world that I just now made up". The worldbuilding section of the book could have used a tighter focus on specific areas - like, for instance, giving a starting area for each zone of the conflict and some local tips for what to do with it, like the brief overview of Gary, Indiana in the Vampire 2nd edition corebook.

A Brief Aside About Hurricane Katrina, Gustav, And Preparedness For Same

Finally, we reach the section about what the developers were going for. They say that they want nine in ten people in the entire world dead; okay, I get it. Nothing wrong with that, 'cause they need a postapocalyptic world and they need to get there somehow. They say that they took a lot of lessons from Hurricane Katrina as to how people will act, and it's here that they show that they're not getting it as much as they think that they are. I'm copying and pasting this so you can see what they're saying.

Hurricane Katrina was still fresh in our minds when we began writing Twilight: 2013, and its lessons deserve careful study. First and foremost, it told us that human nature is to deny impending danger until the last moment. The vast majority of people will not make sufficient preparations for any sort of crisis. Most citizens of developed countries will choose conformity and polite silence over making any sort of public spectacle, and will rely on their governments to provide for them rather than taking responsibility for their own safety. For their part, governments tend to discourage a large degree of self sufficiency for myriad reasons. These mindsets are not conducive to crisis survival, be it on an individual or a societal level. In addition, the last two generations have seen a movement away from rural life in virtually every industrialized nation.

You'll forgive me a brief digression here. Unfortunately for the authors, I live in Lake Charles, Louisiana. I've been through two hurricanes, evacuated to Houston for one of them - getting stuck in the major traffic snarl on I-10 on the way there - and I am going to be going through a bunch more. I've also read the chilling book "The Great Deluge", by Charles Brinkley, which went over Katrina's impact on New Orleans in detail. So I can say with authority that they're completely full of bullshit.

First off, contrary to their pulled-out-of-their-ass assertion by the authors, everybody in Lousiana watches hurricanes like a hawk. They've been through them before, unlike the authors, and the local hardware stores usually experience a run on various hurricane survival goods about three to four days before the hurricane is slated to hit. I myself have two flats of bottled water and a bunch of canned goods in the event that a hurricane hits, and about ten gallons of gas on my balcony. Most of the people around here have generators to provide power. They are aware of when a potential crisis is brewing, and react accordingly.

Second, one of the reasons why people were able to survive Hurricane Katrina is that they did, in fact, store an axe in their attic in the event that they had to chop through their roof to escape a flood, if you want to talk about preparations.

Third, what they see as conformity and polite silence was, in fact, the actions of people who weren't told by their idiot of a mayor that a mandatory evacuation had been announced - and even if they'd known, the buses that were supposed to take them to safety weren't available. Nagin muttered something underneath his breath and then scampered away to his hotel command center.

Fourth, New Orleans is just completely unique in terms of its political and cultural life, and their actions don't represent the people of the United States as a whole. Some chose not to evacuate because they'd been through hurricanes before, others were just stupid, some of them didn't want to leave treasured pets - the only family they had - behind to face the hurricane. None of them were sitting around duh-ing away, waiting for the hurricane to hit. Well, some of them were, but they were in the minority.

Fifth, insulting the actions of people who did manage to survive the horrible conditions involved with Hurricane Katrina as "not conducive to survival" - despite the fact that they did, in fact, manage to survive - is rather insulting to those survivors.

Finally, if you want a good idea of what happened in New Orleans and why, go read "The Great Deluge". It's a harrowing fucking book, which is what made their statement above so irritating. Reading about how badly the government let New Orleans down on just about every level is a harrowing experience. Furthermore, there's this:

Thanks to the development of refrigeration, food production has become a centralized industry in which the vast majority of people no longer participate. Personal hygiene without indoor plumbing, trauma medicine, off-road navigation, and most primary production crafts are likewise skills that are as foreign as hunting and farming to most city-dwellers. Without public utilities and readily-available food, most of us simply don’t know what to do to keep ourselves alive for a year.

Yeah, because if there's a major societal crisis, all of those fancy city slicker types are just going to stand around helplessly poking at our Blackberries in a vain attempt to summon help. I'm pretty sure that somebody who's capable of, say, learning how to use a computer can figure out the complexities of sewing, trauma medicine, off-road navigation and successfully wiping our own bottoms without the aid of a sophisticated robot because, as the authors might note, people are capable of learning new things as the situation dictates.

(I'm reminded of Homer Simpson waiting for the comet. "You see, Lisa, while all of the other people are sitting around going 'DOO-DEEE-DOO-DEE-DOO, DO-DEET-DO-DEET-DIT-DOOOOOOO'....")

It's not like there's no resources available to people who are interested in finding out what life would be like after a nuclear war. Civil Defense manuals, Special Forces survival guides, military manuals, books about nuclear war - there's no shortage. A lot of them disagree, but that's one of the perils of doing research. Unfortunately, the authors don't do their research; they rely on guesswork and supposition instead. This is a major failing for a game that's as firmly based in reality as the Twilight series traditionally has.

In fact, much of their work on the setting feels like it's going to be negated because it's being done by people whose research I don't really trust. For instance, they describe the world's industries as going back to the 1800's, with cottage industries and steam engines, but they make the mistake of assuming that technology relies on raw materials rather than knowledge to work - for instance, I've seen pictures of villagers in Thailand who were able to connect to the Internet by using a cheap computer, a modem, and a bicycle to power the whole thing. (In fact, the authors list just this technology among their power sources in a subsequent chapter.) To be sure, there's going to be a lot of regression, but I imagine that there's also going to be a lot of innovative ways to keep things going. I'm not sure that the authors took this into account when they wrote the foreword.

The System, or Dice Should Not Work That Way

So, then, to the Reflex System. The basic idea is that you roll a number of twenty-sided dice - determined by your skill - trying to beat a target number established by your attribute by taking the lowest result. Once you've beaten your target number, though, you subtract the TN from your roll to get your margin of success.

So, let's say that you're in a normal firefight. You've got a Coordination of 8, you're a Professional with a sidearm and you're trying to hit somebody who's 20 metes away, in the Close Quarters Combat range band, (-1). Your target number is 7. You roll three twenty-sided dice, getting a 4, a 6, and a 9. You hit with the 4, and your margin of success is 3. I'm not going to go into the damage just now, but you get a general idea of how it works.

Of course, here's what happened when I tried to enlist somebody that I played with: They pointed out that the system was too complicated and that they'd use Modern d20 instead. They were more comfortable using a pre-existing system than learning the ins-and-outs of a system that sounded pretty complicated even being described in summary.

Waaay back in the day, I used to recommend that game authors use d20 for everything, instead of creating their own system. I've come away from that to a large degree, mostly because of the storm of fantasy settings that used d20 as a hammock instead of as a trampoline, which resulted in a glut of low-quality stuff on the market. But, really, if you're rolling multiple d20s in an attempt to hit a floating target number, you'd better off going to a system that lets you do the same thing with one. To be sure - and I don't own Modern d20, so I don't know if this is part of the rules system - there's elements of the system that wouldn't work in Twlight 2000; levels wouldn't work, hit points would need to be reworked, the skill system would need to be reworked. I was initially under the impression that the authors had simply updated the old Twilight: 2000 system to the modern day, but after reading an interview with one of the game designers, (http://trollitc.com/2008/11/interview-with-twilight2013-creators) I found out that it was actually a brand-new system, with plans to release it as a standalone for people who wanted to adapt it to something else. I am not entirely sure that's a good idea.

Even worse, when I went back to my parent's house for Christmas vacation, I was able to lay my hands on both the original version of Twilight: 2000, and its second edition. The system in the core Twilight: 2000 rules are a simple percentile roll-under system, and although scaling the difficulty was awkward (dividing the target number for inceased difficulty), the basic idea of rolling percentile semes to be a shitload less complicated than shotgunning d20's to hit a single target number. The second edition even broughtit down to a single dice roll - a d10. I consider percentile systems one of the most elegant and instantly understandable ways to run a system, because everybody understands the idea that you've got a baisc 30% chance to hit somebody with a gun; understanding that you've got a +3 bonus to hit doesn't mean anything without reference to a second or third set of numbers. I think that the authors may have simply been showing off in making their system the way that they did without taking into account what people were looking for. But what they came up with is a system that blends the worst traits of the World of Darkness system (multiple dice, each needing to be checked for a different result) with the worst traits of a target number system (multiple modifiers).

I should also note that the authors keep referring to three levels of complexity when it comes to the Reflex system; Basic, Standard and Advanced. I'm not sure if I'm missing something, but to the best of my knowledge, I don't believe that the core difference between the three models is addressed. There's a lot of sidebars about how you can add level three complexity to the existing rules, most of it covering extreme cases of simulationism, but if somebody wants to let me know about the basic difference, I'm all ears.

The attributes are pretty standard, with a few exceptions. Coordination handles how well you fire a gun, but two additional attributes make things a little more fun: Coolness Under Fire and Observe-Orient-Direct-Act, both of which are part of the game's second tier of rules. Coolness Under Fire lets you figure out if your character is the kind of person who can act when being fired upon, whereas Observe-Orient-Direct-Act - OODA for short, thank Christ - acts as a sort of initiative modifier. Attributes can be rolled randomly, or, more usefully, done as a point-buy system, with the option to adjust the attribute pool according to the desired level of character experience.

Twilight: 2000 is one of those few games that uses a Lifepath system in order to determine how your character evolves out of their initial attributes, and it's a scream. I still have screaming nightmares from the lifepath system of Mechwarrior's third edition ("NNNNG! NNNNG! THRESHOLD GONNA KILL ME! NNG!"), but Twilight: 2013's system makes Mechwarrior's look even worse. (It's good, is what I mean.)

You start off as a fresh-faced eighteen-year old with the basic attributes and skills that everybody gets; then, you pick the occupation that seems to fit your general character concept. (A minor irritation occurs when the game forces you to spend points on a language - I don't think that anybody has fun playing out the various complications that arise when PCs don't speak the same language as an NPC, which is why it's mostly glossed over in games.) I usually hate random attribute generation because of how much control it takes away from your ability to make a character, but the lifepath system lets you evolve a lump of clay into somebody who's got a functioning life.

For instance: I started off with a guy who went straight into college after he hit eighteen, then spent six years there. Once he was out, I was thinking of getting him into a graduate program, but his low Resolve score scotched that; he became a journalist instead, where he spent eight years, then was turned into a refugee by the war. By the time he was finished, he was an extraordinarily smart, charismatic guy, but weak in body and will. When the bombs dropped, his stats weren't good enough to get him involved in any kind of warfare - which kind of went against my idea of him as a journalist who'd finally decided to pick up a gun and fight - and so he became a displaced person, probably trying to find a way back to America out of Africa.

For a switchup, I decided to ride with my current obsession with the Road Warrior and decided to see what Wez's life was like before the juice ran out and the world stopped. It turns out that he was into the world of professional motorcycle racing (probably dirtbikes) until he joined the military, served some years in Armored Reconnaissance, then became a gang member until he spent the Last Year in irregular warfare, presumably riding with Humungus and his gang - or, at least, that's the career path that seemed to simulate his skills appropriately. (You could argue that he didn't acquire many of his skills after the apocalypse, rather than beforehand, but that's neither here nor there.)

It's a marvelous way to create a character, because of the range of options provided. Every career choice offers a particular set of attribute bonuses - there's even an option to let your character be a slacker, which gives few skills but a little more freedom in picking out which skills you want. Wanna be a criminal? You've got five different ways, including runs through prison if you happen to fail an attribute check at the end.

It's not just the high-end, most useful careers that are available. If you want to slack off for four years, get married, be a homemaker, then get divorced and go work in the service industry, you can do that. It's like the Game of Life with a nuclear explosion as the capper. If you're looking to buff attributes, then you can spend skill points on a 4:1 basis to take a single point in any attribute made available in a particular career choice. You're prevented from creating a hundred-year old character by having to check your attributes for degradation at every five-year interval past thirty - you can kill a character in character generation, although the game points out that this will probably only happen if you try to create a 135-year old Special Forces veteran.

There are a few quirks. For instance, entering into military service demands that all of your physical attributes have at least five points in each of them, but this means that players who emphasize brains over muscle will probably be unable to enter the military without buffing themselves up by taking an alternative career or two in order to buff up the weaker stats. Furthermore, there's a sharp division between actual military personnel - whose skills are primarily focused on skills that make you useful in combat, like Tactics and Command - and civilian skills, which tend to minimize combat skills. Take, say, Louis from Left 4 Dead; if you run him through the IT lifepath, then you don't get any personal skill points to spend and so can't model his admitted hitting of the rifle range at lunchtime.

On the one hand, this does help to model the idea that somebody who studies war will be much, much better than the average civilian; on the other hand, civilian PCs are going to be at a sharp disadvantage whenever combat starts. Sure, they're going to want to get those skills ASAP, but you might wind up with a situation where one guy does all the fighting and the rest scatter for cover or plink away with inaccurate fire against trained foes. You sort of get stuck into one category or another, where every subsequent career path reinforces your specialization - either civilian (lots of useful skills, no combat), or military (small number of focused skills, great combat.)

Part of this problem has to do with the Last Year - well, it's not exactly a problem, but it's an issue that feeds into the game. The Last Year occurs at the very end of your character generation, and determines what you're going to be doing as the bombs are falling. Two of them are warfare paths, two of them are survival paths, but if you don't have the skills necessary to enter those paths, then you wind up as a displaced person, which doesn't offer much of a chance to buff your combat skills. It's kind of a keen way to see what your character was doing as the bombs dropped, but you have to have made the right choices in chargen - buffing Resolve, buffing Fieldcraft or Streetcraft, buffing a weapon skill - then you wind up with displaced, which doesn't offer much of a boost to your character. It's almost a game in its own right, but if you're making a character for the first time, you may wind up running into roadblocks that don't fit with your character's design and have to start over again from scratch.

Once you've gone through your lifepath system, you tote up the number of skill points that you've put into each skill, then translate that into a rating. There's a lot of math in this system, and while I'm not entirely upset with the final point spread (and consequent ratings) that I got for my skill set, I wish that they'd found a way to translate it into a simpler system. (You could just take your final numeric result, divide it in half, and then use that as a skill modifier for a d20 dice roll - it may or may not work, but it would let you use the excellent lifepath system with d20.)

Blind, Leprous Ninjas

Unfortunately, the game uses advantages and disadvantages in the classic sense, where you gets points at chargen for taking an advantage or disadvantage. This kind of system has always been abused, where you'd get PCs that were blind, legless, leprous albinos who were somehow the best shots in the world thanks to big chunks of experience derived from being blind, legless, leprous albinos. There's nothing wrong with the advantages and disadvantages per se, but I would have preferred that they use the 7th Sea / NWoD model, where disadvantages grant XP during play rather than providing a bonus up front. Some of the disadvantages are just game-breaking - for instance, somebody who's blind in a postnuclear environment is not long for this world, unfortunately. They also include a series of codes as a disadvantage, which I imagine will replicate the flaws of Vampire's old Path/Morality system without really adding anything. You'll have to see how it works out for you in your game.

The game also offers a Hazardous Duty chart as a way to increase your combat attributes (Coolness Under Fire and OODA) in exchange for risking your health on the Hazaradous Duty table. Unfortunately, you have to accept the game's slightly outdated disadvantage/advantage system if you want to do it, so that the game can issue a definite penalty for getting a bad dice roll on the table. The table itself is pretty interesting, working with both the advantages/disadvantages and the career system to flesh out a character - maybe you froze up during combat, got a friend killed and couldn't continue in a military career, or wind up with a friendly dog as a sidekick, or have your tour of duty extended.

WHAT IS YOUR MAJOR MALFUNCTION, PRIVATE JEDI MASTER LUKE SKYWALKER?

The Team section offers an interesting mechanic to encourage a military style of play. The military is an intensely hierarchical system, where everybody follows out the orders of those above them; PCs, by contrast, go to great lengths to ensure that they answer to no-one and have as much freedom as possible. But accurately simulating a military unit means that somebody has to be in charge, issuing orders, and that everybody else should try to follow those orders instead of doing their own thing. The authors came up with a clever solution: Whoever's the leader - determined by military rank - issues an order, then makes a Command check. If he succeeds, then everybody following those orders gets a bonus equivalent to their team Integration score, which means that teams that make an effort to work and train together will be mechanically rewarded. You can adjust your team Integration score on the fly, too, so that you can mechanically simulate a new guy who's fresh and eager but who isn't aware of what to do, or how a dispute between two members of a unit can disrupt a unit's cohesion.

However, the game takes it a touch too far with the idea that characters who are behaving independently of their leader's orders are breaking formation. It drops the various buffs that you get from following orders - which is acceptable - but also forces everybody else in the group to pass a Coolness Under Fire check iin order to lose all of the bonuses given by obeying.

This is, to my mind, bad design. It's nice to have some kind of system to represent the abilities of a good commander, but the disobedience of one person shouldn't result in the possibility of an entire team losing their combat bonuses from that leadership. I don't know enough about how military forces function in real life, but I'm guessing that they're trained to react to members of their own team doing something unexpected and compensating accordingly. I'd suggest something along the lines of allowing players to disobey orders if they let everybody know what they're doing in advance, so people can prepare accordingly, but I've never been much of a system wonk...

The game also includes reaction drills, prearranged actions for when something happens; if you expect to be ambushing a lot, for instance, you can come up with a reaction drill for who does what, and you're rewarded with an automatic Command check pass. This is really neat stuff. (I think that I've heard about something similar in one of the paramilitary supplements for Top Secret S.I., I think, but it's been a while. Something paramilitary, at least.)

The Combat System, or Please Stop Calculating And Just Fire the Damn Bullet Already

The combat system. This is going to be the meat and potatoes of the game, as Twilight: 2000 is essentially a military game. The system breaks initiative into individual ticks, so that you can accurately simulate how long it takes to fire a weapon, ready a weapon, activate equipment and so forth. But it gets pretty bizarre pretty quickly. Your encumbrance score indicates your basic initiative score; then you have to roll against your OODA score and multiply your margin by two to get the first tick that you can act on. The higher your number, the more actions you can take within a combat round - if firing a weapon takes five ticks, and you've got an initiative score of 25, you can fire every five ticks. Once you hit the bottom, everything starts over again. I think that it's kind of a cool system, but there's that initial intiative roll sitting there, sticking its horrible tongue out and mocking you with its complication. (Plus, when's the last time that you worried about encumbrance in an RPG? Even in the postapocalyptic world of Twilight: 2013, I imagine that people would just keep their shit in the Humvee.)

Let's say that you want to do something simple, like fire a gun NOT SO FAST. No, before you shoot the guy you want to shoot, you have to figure out which of the three ways you're going to shoot him (blind, hip or aimed) - including the Bulk penalties of your weapon if you're hip-firing - all of the various bonuses and penalties that you're applying to your roll due to range and weather conditions and the size of your target and whether they're moving or not relative to you, and the bonuses that your gun applies for being in a range band that it likes, and the recoil level for how many shots you're firing and then your players are getting out Settlers of Catan and you're wondering how you wound up spending $40 on a system that's clearly designed to drive everybody bugfuck insane.

I mean, seriously: If you're taking into account the ranges that your gun is designed to fire at, then you're going into way too much detail for way too little return. The kind of anal detail that the game goes into over combat may work if you're intimately familiar with the system, as the authors apparently are, but I wouldn't bring this thing anywhere near my players. It's telling that the authors didn't include a complete combat round of two people firing at each other, because then the reader could see just how much ridiculous detail goes into even a single combat round. It would have also been nice – and I may have missed this, because I was reading it in PDF format – to see a complete list of all of the potential modifiers that go into a roll, like d20 does.

If you hit, there's a relatively simple system to figure out where you hit - two dice, cross-referenced on a table. Each body part has four damage thresholds attached to it - slight/moderate/serious/critical - derived from your attributes. If you get hit in the limb, you add the weapon's base damage to your margin of success and see which threshold it exceeds. (Say that your Moderate threshold is 14 and your Critical threshold is 16. If you get hit with a 14 or 15, it's a Moderate wound.) Damage stacks up, so that four minor wounds in a single area turn into a critical wound. It gets nasty when you factor in shock and instability. Anything over a moderate wound means that you can either enter shock (which knocks out you out of combat entirely) or get unstable (at which point you start bleeding out.) That makes combat fairly lethal. If you've got two players, and they both get shocked out - well, whoever's attacking can just strut on up and put a bullet into your head while you're trying to get your brains back together.

The game does offer characters survival points. You use them to mitigate wound penalties (so you can avoid getting knocked out by a stray bullet), to boost rolls, aid somebody else in healing you, or to boost your ability to avoid being freaked out by overwhelming force. You refresh them by role-playing well, but there's some hinks involved. First, survival points are assigned by age, so if you're 18, you get 12; if you're a decrepit old man of 25, then you get eight. If you're 40? You get five.

To be sure, young men are at the peak of their physical condition, and they're able to react a lot faster, but it penalizes people who want to play the grizzled old man who breaks open his armory to fight the invading Chinese. It's a counterbalance to the number of skills that you get with an older character, but I'm pretty sure that you'll need survival points just to stay alive in a firefight. It's a counterbalance to a counterbalance to a counterbalance, like a series of elephants stacked up on each other; it would have been easier just to sacrifice realism in the name of not having to worry about so many small details.

And I think that this points to another problem with the game: If you subtract a rule, then you wind up unbalancing the game. The game works like a Swiss watch. Remove a gear, or ignore its effects, and the other gears speed up or slow down - everything's inter-related. Without having a holistic view of the system as a whole, you can't really alter it without breaking something.

The chapter on maintenance starts off by misspelling it as mainanance. I normally excuse misspellings because nobody's perfect, and I'm sure that there's words that regularly misspell without knowing it, but, like, it's not good to see that as a chapter title.

Green Soldier Needs Food Badly, May Kill and Eat Refugee

But, to continue: Because Twilight: 2013 is a postapocalyptic game, most of the stuff that you take for granted in a game - access to food, some kind of medicine, shelter and transporation - aren't necessarily going to be there. If you want to take the Humvee with you, you're going to have to find a way to get some fuel for it, and you're going to have to figure out what you do when the thing sputters to a halt. Food's important; there's rules for hunting, trapping, fishing (with or without grenades) - even, believe it or not, agriculture, to determine how much food a farmer can pull in over the space of a year. There's also rules covering fatigue, water and shelter. This sounds like it's petty nitpicking over stuff that would be better glossed over, but it's soon after an apocalypse - it'd be fun to see an adventure where the characters are working towards getting enough food to keep them from starving, rather than for treasure. Of course, if you're read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road", then you may be aware that getting food is not necessarily the harmless activity that is today. (I keep wondering if you could get the players to start killing for food - not somebody who deserves it, but just somebody who has food.)

If you get hurt, then there's no healing potions to heal you - even with qualified medical help, you're still going to be taking a while to recover from most injuries. But here's where things get a little confused for me. Let's say that you get shot in the chest and take a serious wound. The base time to recover from a serious wound is 90 days, which is then divided by your healing factor - determined from your fitness and depending on shelter, food, and water. As far as I can tell, the only drawback that you get from having a serious wound in your chest is a -3 penalty to all skill checks, which is not exactly crippling. I believe that they're glossing over the more serious effects of an injury to keep player characters mobile, so that they don't have to stop for a month to recover from one of their number getting a sucking chest wound. As wound systems go, it's not bad at all. If you're lucky enough to have access to a well-stocked trauma center, healing times are cut much more dramatically short - which makes access to medical supplies much more important.

Diseases are covered, but, more importantly, so is radiation. Your access to shelter determines how vulnerable you are to disease - you're not necessarily going to get a disease just sitting around, but if you're living raw in the wilderness, you're rolling every time you meet a new group of people. All of the major diseases are represented, ranging from little stuff like flu to the big killers, like pneumonic plague and typhus. If you can get access to antibiotics, it's that much easier to treat - but, of course, that's an adventure in itself. Radiation is measured in rads. Every time you wind up racking up more than fifty rads in a day, you make a Fitness roll, modified by your overall radiation level; fail, and you've got radiation sickness. Botch it hard enough, and your character dies. It's fair enough - it lets players live with radiation without having to deal with the ongoing side effects. Not realistic, but fair.

But then we get a little nuts. You can measure the amount of wear and tear that a particular piece of equipment takes, which means that players will have to devote in-game time to figuring out if their Humvee needs servicing now or later, or whether their M-16A2 can survive one more firefight or if it's time to switch over to something more reliable. There's rules available for salvaging, cannibalizing old equipment, even rules for searching the countryside for a specific item that you need. I'm of two minds: Yeah, it's very realistic, and it prevents the characters from treating everything that they've got like it'll live forever. On the one hand, it's a excellent way to portray what it's like after a complete societal collapse: Your tank need a particular gear or it can't work? Find it or leave the tank behind as the world's most luxurious squirrel nest. On the other hand, it's a hangover from the days when games were less social constructs and more these weird amalgams of wargames and simulations. If your GM grew up on White Wolf, then it's going to be a major shift in how he handles stuff that's usually abstracted nowadays.

In fact, the more I read of the chapter, the more it feels directly inspired by stories that I read about World War II boardgames back in the days of Avalon Hill. I'm not sure if the one that I'm thinking of is Advanced Squad Leader or not - it has been a long time since I read that book about wargames - but I remember that it got to the point where you had charts devoted to which way squads of men would emerge from a manhole after using the sewers for transport. If you want fuel, and you don't have it, you'll have to convert your car to using alcohol - and that means gathering wood, stuff to make the mash out of, time spent waiting for the mash to ferment. There's formulas for all of that, based from the character's skills. Want to build a house? There's a formula for that too. Want to see how survivable it is? Formula. Rules for building bridges? Yes. Footbridges? Them too. Want to preserve meat? Roll to see how much you're able to preserve from that deer that you shot - or, at least, tried to shoot before the GM got tired of figuring out modifiers and just declared that it was dead. Was this what people did, back in the days before masturbation was discovered?

There’s Rules For What, Now?

The next chapter deals with equipment, and the state of the world as it exists after the blowup. Everything's in short supply except for ways to kill your fellow man, if you'd like me to nutshell about three pages about the state of the world. Characters get to pick their own personal equipment according to their encumbrance; if your character can carry it, then he can have it. (Sure, he can have a fancy battle rifle: Can he find ammo for it? Sure, he can have an anti-tank weapon: Is it a one-shot?) In another holdover from the original game, every character playing in the game contributes equipment dice to a single pool, which are rolled to determine what your party gets that can't be carried with you. The cool thing is that you can pick which equipment table you want to roll on. Want to have a central base of locations with some really excellent stuff? Pool your dice and hope for a high roll on the Tools and Fixed Equipment table. Want to be on the move? Focus on vehicle, fuel and weapon rolls. Unfortunately, you can't get military weapons and equipment unless you were in Twilight Warfare in the last year, which further emphasizes the divide between civilians and the military, which I'm still not fond of. I really like it; it's a neat setup. In fact, I'm going to use these rules in the event that I run a postapocalyptic game.

There is one thing that I think that's particularly cool: All of the equipment that you get when you first start the game is considered personal equipment, and automatically subtracts a single point from the difficulty number of your rolls. You can make other equipment personal, but it takes time getting familiar with it in order to enjoy that side effect. Even more interesting is an optional rule to sacrifice personal equipment in order to avoid damage; you lose a prized possession, but don't die, which is nice. You can also carry personal effects - pictures of loved ones, a favorite soft drink - but the game doesn't specify if they can be sacrificed as well.

I'm thinking of two things in mind to this. One of them is a scene from the Terminator where Kyle Reese is knocked aside by a Terminator's weapon and watches his picture of Sarah Connor burn as he lies there stunned; another is Ned Flanders surviving two direct bullet wounds to the heart thanks to his habit of carrying both a Bible and a piece of the One True Cross over his heart. I'm saying that if you decide to use this rule, be sure that your players don't start habitually lugging around sacks full of fragments of the One True Cross. ("Fuck you, my character's just really religious!")

The equipment lists are thorough to the point of madness. For instance, the list of clothing includes everything between diving suits to trauma plates to elbow and knee pads. You do have a basic system for determining how well-armored you are, but a lot of stuff has special circumstances attached to it. For instance, if you decide to take the risk and wear elbow and knee pads, changing stances is going to cost you an extra tick of time to account for their bulk. The good news is that if you're hit in the leg or arm, and the projectile has Penetration Nil, then there's a 20% chance that you'll take no damage at all. So, you know, you'll have to balance the extra time that it takes to change stances versus the off-chance that something will bounce off your elbow pad.

I'm picking on this particular example because there are a lot of specialized rules in the book for pieces of unusual armor; for instance, trauma plates grant a percentage chance that you'll be able to add your trauma plate's value to your basic armor, rather than contributing directly to armor. Goggles have a 10% chance of resisting any damage from a Penetration Nil effect. Hazmat suits force the player to act as if they're working in hot weather. I'm impressed by the level of detail that they put into the effects of armor, but if your players aren't wargaming grognards, they may find this stuff entirely ignorable.

You're limited from carrying every piece of armor you can by the encumbrance rules, which again, are fairly realistic. Back in the old days, encumbrance rules were there mostly to prevent adventurers from grabbing everything that they could lay their hands on. In a military context, encumbrance is critical in real-life situations; you have to strike a balance between mobility and survivability. The encumbrance rules are actually pretty good, letting you figure out various loads (light, moderate, heavy and overloaded) using your character's strength and giving effects for each. If you're walking along with a moderate load, and somebody starts shooting at you, you're not going to be able to sprint unless you drop some equipment. Again, great for military simulation, not so much for the purpose of lighter gaming.

But beyond armor, you also get lists of just about everything a soldier can own. Packs and load-bearing equipment? Yes. Flares and CB radios? Yes. Bugles and bedrolls? Them too. (Bugles can act as signalling devices, and were used by Chinese forces in the Korean War to let their soldiers know when to attack.) Leg irons and CD players? Included. Fishing kits and cigarette lighters? Yes. Chemlights and notebook computers? Yes. Portable toilets and altimeters? Yes. Six different kinds of antibiotics? Why not? I confess that at this point, I began scanning through and looking only for items of interest, because while these lists are thorough, they're not really the focus of the games that I run. If you want to turn your characters into makeshift quartermasters, hey, best of luck. The world has moved on.

Guns? There's a ton of them. Accessories, too. You get the idea, I think.

The vehicle rules aren't terrribly complicated; most of the chart consulations will result from checking hit locations to various parts of the vehicle and the results of same. There's a wide variety of vehicles listed and statted out, but weirdly enough, while the Soviets have two main battle tanks listed - the ancient T-55 (still in use in the Soviet Union) and the more modern T-72 - the Americans have no battle tanks statted out at all. We also get the Bradley, but not the Humvee, one of the most commonly used vehicles in the US Army. I think that this might have had to do with a rights and/or naming issue - maybe they weren't able to get the name rights from Lockheed-Martin or whomever - but their exclusion is still pretty baffling. If you're looking to simulate The Road Warrior, I'm afraid that there's no rules for jumping from one vehicle to another. Mind you that it's not explicitly dismissed as impossible; I'm guessing that some kind of athletics check would probably do the job. There's also no explicit rules for car chases, but you could mock that up by comparing Margin of Successes and converting that into car lengths. I imagine that if the game becomes popular, they may go back and either borrow rules for armored combat from an earlier supplement, or make up rules of their own.

Mopping Up Last Signs of Resistance

We arrive in the narrative chapter. I should note that the game does drop minor jokes throughout the book in an attempt to keep things light, and while nothing's quite as funny as some of the stuff I've seen in Monsters & Other Childish Things, I did like the idea of Lord Humongous as an alternate name for the GM. Most of the advice is pretty boilerplate stuff - getting times together to play, making sure that everybody's needs are satisfied. The game doesn't pick a particular campaign as the default, instead presenting a whole bunch of different options and letting the GM pick - including, weirdly enough, a campaign where supernatural monsters have risen in the aftermath of the apocalypse. The game notes that the Reflex System doesn't support supernatural creatures or magic yet; I should note that d20 has from the beginning.

The GM section also has a number of NPCs to throw into the campaign, short blurbs and stats describing how people are handling the world after the bomb. I really liked this section a lot, because every NPC is a plot hook in itself; the desperate housewife wants to keep her kids safe, the paramedic-turned-surgeon needs medical supplies, the vengeful technocrat needs acknowledgment of her skills in exchange for keeping the servers running., and the haunted analyst saw the apocalypse, but couldn't do anything about it - except that she's seeing those same patterns again.

I think that as a third edition of a game, Twilight: 2013 suffers from both the ambitions of its new owners, in the form of the system, and from the weight of the game's past, in the archaic way that it uses mechanics to simulate human activity. I keep wondering if the system works more smoothly than I thought, but then I think about the way that it handles modifiers to those rolls and I assure myself that yeah, that is kinda messed up. If you like simulationist games, you'll probably be in heaven.

I don't know. I think that it would be worth your time, if you're interested in the third edition, is picking up the first edition of the game beforehand, and seeing just how far you can get from Kaisny.

Good luck. You're on your own.

-Darren MacLennan