ChalkLine's Desiderata

[ChalkLine]

The following being a couple of years-long stream-of-consciousness posts on the Twilight 2000 Face Book page.

Please note that nearly all these posts refer to the First Edition timeline. I know a lot of the vehicles here are covered on Paul's site, most of what I'm posting is for colour and context.

[ChalkLine]

20 years ago I was working on a largish building site. It was pouring down raining one day so I made up a list of what would be salvaged there if the workers just never came back.
It was a large site; about eight five-story buildings:
- Mobile 25t crane, four-wheel drive, as ten-ton truck. This has four wheels and a crane only as structure, and is abysmally slow on the road.
- 3x Hoists, each hoist lifts a steel, 1m high, 'basket' about 3m2, the hoist gantry is three sided and runs on an inbuilt generator. Each gantry section was 6m long. There is no 'floor' button on each level; an operator at the foot of the gantry controls it. Total gantry length would be about 60m but it wouldn't be safe up to that height!
- 8x Oxy Acetylene welding kits, usually about 60% full. There was a supply container (20') onsite for welding supplies.
- 18 wheeler and pup trailer, dumper.
- 2x Compressors (trailer size, mondo)
- First Aid demountable shed, well stocked
- 20x temporary power poles, steel, 6m high
- 100m power cable
- 2x mini refrigerators
- 4x civilian sedans
- 3x civilian utilities (pick ups)
- 2x civilian vans
- 1300m2 form-boards, 16mm 12ply. We were making the structures out of concrete. This is sufficient to make an eight-story building with three lifts in one shot. Of course, it was spread over eight buildings.
- 3x bobcats and interchangeable tools
- Four wheel drive forklift, about 8t
- 100x pallets of concrete block bricks
- 13x 20' shipping containers
- 4x 40' shipping containers
- 2x backhoes
- 1x excavator
- 1x concrete pumping truck, the arm had a ten-story reach.
- 2x concrete trucks
- 7x demountable sheds, with sinks.
- 2x demountable toilet/shower blocks, filthy.
- 14x power-boards
- 8x garbage skips
- 870x star pickets (star droppers, steel stakes)
- 3000m x 3m (9m sections) Green plastic shade cloth
- 3000m x 3m (9m sections) steel 'cyclone' chain-link mesh
- 3x 25' cabin cruisers (I have no idea either)
- 35' yacht (ditto)
- 60x (2m x 3m) 'cyclone' chain-link mesh frames with 2" steel pipe frame.
- 10x 40m (40mm) Water hose (we were always pumping)
- 5t truck with extendable crane and bore for footings
- 5x 50m coils copper water pipe
- 20' container plumbing supplies
- 20' container paint supplies
- 20' container power tools and expendables
- 20' container electrical supplies
- 20' container safety supplies

Concrete and reinforcement steel was brought in as needed so the players would have to go look for that.

[ChalkLine]

If you're like me it always confused me that when you get a vehicle in T2k you don't get *any* of its equipment, not even a jack! 🙂
Anyway, here's a load plan someone gave me for a Bradley M3A2. I'm not sure of how accurate it is but it was given to me by someone with intimate experience with Brads.

M3A2 ODS Bradley CFV
Ammunition & Pyrotechnics
2 TOW 2A ATGMs ready loaded
100 rounds 25mm APDS-T M791 ready loaded
200 rounds 25mm HEI-T M792 ready loaded
800 rounds 7.62mm (4-1) ready loaded COAX
200 rounds 25mm APDS-T M791 stowed
400 rounds 25mm HEI-T M792 stowed
1 400 rounds 7.62mm (4-1) stowed
1 000 rounds 5.56mm stowed
2 M47 Dragon missiles
2 M18 Claymore mines
16 smoke grenades for vehicle launchers
4 illumination flares
4 coloured smoke grenades
4 incendiary grenades (for vehicle self-destruction only)
Other Expendables
330 litres of fuel in the fuel tank
5 20-litre plastic jerry cans of potable water (10 lts per man per day all uses)
Vehicle Equipment
3 Fire extinguishers (turret, driver & rear compartments) (Internal Halon system inoperable)
Flotation screen & supports
Flotation screen repair kit
Spare screen supports
2 Camouflage screens and poles
Tarpaulin
2 Track links
1 Track ficture
1 Track drift pin
Maintenance platform on the upper hull (this can be attached to the hull in front of the engine access panel, to give the crew a horizontal surface to stand and work on).
Tracked vehicle tools sufficient to undertake routine maintenance and perform simple tasks.
Shovel
Axe
Mattock
Sledge hammer
Crow bar
Heavy duty two cable
50 metres of razor wire concertina
1 5-litre can of motor oil
1 2-litre can of transmission fluid
1 2-litre can of grease
2 20-litre plastic jerry cans filled with non-potable water
Grease gun
Cable reel
Pintle
Panel marker
Traversing unit
Windshield kit
Drivers thermal night viewer & spare lens
AND/VDR-2 tactical survey meter and vehicle radiac set
AN/PRS-7 or -11 mine detector
M256 chemical detector kit
M42 alarm detector
M43 alarm detector and battery
A decontamination apparatus is stored on the forward part of the turret shield,
AN/GRA-39 radio set
AT-784/PRC antenna
Spare radio antennas
TA-1/PT telephone set
TA-312/TP telephone set
First aid kit, contents limited to a selection of wound dressings, bandages, scissors and antiseptic
Hand crank generator M91
Mounted Water Ration Heater
Camp stove
Bucket
Dozen bungee cords
Lantern, powered by vehicle
Rope, 50 m
Sandbags, empty, 1 dozen
Battery charger
Commanders Equipment
Issue mapcase
1:100 000 map of Poland, eastern Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Austria
1:50 000 map of western Poland
Prismatic compass
Protractor, ruler, pencils
Angle head torch & 2 D cell batteries
M22 7x50 binoculars
Prismatic compass
M238 flag set
Scout Equipment
M60 machine gun (temperamental - doesnt like heat, cold, dirt or water, ie frequent malfunctions)
M60 spare barrel equipment bag including asbestos glove for barrel changing
M60 tripod
AN/PRC-77 radio and LC-2 cargo frame
M49 telescope & tripod
M22 7x50 binoculars
Prismatic compass
AN/PVS-7B night vision goggles (2 prs) (no batteries)
AN/PVS-4 night vision sight (no batteries)
Individual Equipment
1 MOPP suit including gloves per man stored under his seat
1 Personal weapon, set of LBE, rucksack and duffel bag per man

[ChalkLine]

When the warbirds get grounded the ground pounders probably breathe a sigh of relief right
Almost.
The USSR still had its huge 2S4 240mm mortar, a beast throwing a massive shell the size of a middling air to ground dumb bomb and capable of doing the tasks that things like the JDARM do today. Bunker busters, the dreaded CHEM shell, vast HE rounds and cluster bombs, not to mention its tactical nuclear shell.
Put a few in your game today . . .

https://www.armyrecognition.com/imag...eprint_001.jpg

[ChalkLine]

The Wieliczka Salt Mine just east of Krak3w

[ChalkLine]

Chemical Warfare

While the Rool-Of-Cool states the GM can use anything anywhere, T2k has always had a strong grounding in some realities about where or why things appear in the campaign. Chemical warfare, one of the most feared things that exist in the game, is not usually looked into simply because it is so feared. However, let's have look at why and where it's deployed.
Basically, chemical warfare is simply a tool in the military toolbox. Once approval has been granted for release the OPFOR or Allied commander will look at the battle-space and see if chemical weapons have the ability to act as a force multiplier and what the effects will be. They don't simply soak the battleground in chemicals.

Chemical weapons are one of a class that have effects on both sides, and as such aren't applicable to many situations. As many of the posters here have over the years have made accounts of the terrible conditions that chemical warfare countermeasures inflict on the combat personnel and their large negative effects on combat capability - especially combat endurance - it becomes obvious that chemicals have a fairly niche application.

As everyone here knows, there's essentially three sorts of of chemical weapon:
- Nerve Agents
- Blister Agents
- Choking Agents

Nerve Agents promise fast disabling of enemy forces but also heavily contaminate the battlefield. Thirty years after the end of the Cold War we can actually admit that the USSR did actually see the Poles as allies, and as such weren't in a big hurry to contaminate Poland wholesale for many practical reasons. Nerve agent release also limits the enemy from manoeuvring in the contaminated area as all nerve agents are very persistent and also have very damaging long-term contamination that may make the battleground impassable for years to come. As such important choke points and other strategic areas should never be attacked with nerve agents. Also areas that have water run-off towards strategic areas should also be avoided, especially if that run-off flows back into your own territory. Prevailing winds, which in the European plain blows mainly west, should be taken into account when looking at nerve agent deployment. This means Warsaw Pact deployment of nerve agents are more likely to blow into enemy territory than NATO deployments. However NATO long range deployments might be used to attack rear-areas without an accompanying ground attack. These attacks would be invariably area-denial in nature so players could expect them to be well-marked by Warsaw Pact forces by the time they got to them - assuming there was any local survivors.

Nerve agents, like biological and nuclear weapons, are the best way of limiting player movement into areas where the campaign simply doesn't go.

Blister Agents are less persistent in most cases, but this is relative. Stormwater runoff can become heavily contaminated and cause significant injuries on contact if the blister agent has had a heavy release. Blister agents re seen by militaries as more-easily countered and so have been kept in store alongside more effective nerve agents because friendly troops can manoeuvre through contaminated areas with less losses. Blister agents are used, like artillery, against set positions and less as area-denial. Blister agents are a serious threat to players and the GM should think long and hard on how blister agent attacks should be made on characters. I personally thing they should be encountered more as an NPC-on-NPC attack to allow the players to experience them but to be well prepared.
Blister agents are, in my opinion, at the upper limit of destructive power a GM should allow players. It should be noted that civilians are almost never protected against blister or nerve agents and collateral damage of this sort of release will be high in civilian populations, especially among the vulnerable.

Choking agents are commonly deployed by even very advanced governments on their own citizens. Choking agents have little persistence except in very high concentrations and rapidly degrade, but that doesn't mean that they're harmless. In Viet Nam the USA deployed choking agents as area denial in OPFOR tunnel complexes in concentrations that were lethal. However choking agents are easily countered if a group is prepared and make a good tactical complication in T2k combat. Choking agents are also far less restricted in use than nerve or blister agents and can be encountered far further down the command chain than the other agents that are usually restricted to the divisional level or release. They have a heavy effect when used by surprise on unaware or resting troops. Long term use on set positions can make those positions untenable, and both players and NPCs may resort to 'smoking out' well-entrenched units with these agents deployed over long periods.

Persistence.
The major aspect the players will encounter with chemical agents is their persistent nature and the contamination of the campaign area.
As noted above, water runoff is a prime area of contamination, as is the interior of areas not exposed to the weather. Some of the more persistent agents such as the nerve agent VX 'stick' to the underside of surfaces and can make contaminated areas instantly lethal for long and varying periods after deployment. The interior of structures used as shelter and defensive positions, abandoned vehicles and public structures can all be contaminated by chemical agents and the GM should give this some thought when designing a new area. Small spaces such as utility sheds that are rarely opened are especially prone to contamination. Another danger is the repair and use of utilities such as water and air services that may flush out contamination. To be fair a GM should have this happen to NPCs before inflicting it on players so the players can develop some survival skills regarding this aspect.

Anyone want to chime in
How about storing chemical weapons and decontamination

[ChalkLine]

The rare form of transport device:

Porters.

People who carry your stuff. Apart from their food, bedding and so on, how much can the average person carry
Who are these people

Some can be hired. Some might be from your country in a strange land and hook up for protection. Some might be related to you.

Something that has disappeared from the world since World War 2; hand carts.
Simply it's a cart you drag along by hand. Perhaps they can be made from wheel barrow materials now.

Also, I wonder how much a wheel barrow can carry

[ChalkLine]

Vehicle Load-Outs.

I always liked how The Morrow Project bit the bullet and created vehicle's load-outs for their vehicles. I get the sneaking feeling that the standard Twilight 2000 'all the stuff on the vehicles has been lost' was just a cop-out.

The problem is of course that in reality no two vehicle type has the same load-out and making a list for them would be nigh on impossible.

[ChalkLine]

What changes have you made to your game

I went for a radical change to a more lethal system, but I also noted a few things that I personally didn't like too much about the standard game:
(Please note the following is simply personal preference)

- An over emphasis on special forces by many players.
I think this is frankly because players know 'skills = survival' and playing a spec ops gets you those skills.
To change this I just gave out a skill total that was the same for everyone and players got to choose whatever skills they liked within reason. I also made it clear that after four years alive in world war three the PCs were now as skilled as any special forces operator even if they were a lowly private in an infantry section.

- The ranks seem too high.
I've been in many a game where there are multiple colonels and sergeant majors. It just seemed silly even with the rapid advancement.
The campaigns I ran we did without rank tables and just had nearly everyone a private, one or two corporals and a sergeant plus one LT. This actually had a strange development where the privates became the main social group.

Typing this out I suddenly realised that I may have been heavily influenced by movies like Cross of Iron and Kelly's Heroes.

[ChalkLine]

Missions outside the perimeter for canton troops:

- Basic Patrols
Intelligence is vital and clearing patrols stop OPFOR from making positions outside the perimeter. Things spotted from the lookout positions need someone to go and check them out such as smoke columns and various sounds such as gunfire or screams for example.

- Salvage and Upkeep.
The perimeter is never strong enough and forays into the hinterland for barbed wire from old positions, recovered land mines (who wants that job!), bunker materials and similar can be scavenged from spots the patrols find. Similarly fuel, even something as simple as wood for heating and stills, can be hunted up. Food is a constant requirement and intel from patrols or friendly civvies and stragglers might develop locations for these. Vehicle wrecks are great resources that need specialised missions to recover.

- Anti-Battery Missions.
Nothing sucks more than being mortared for days on end. Missions to deal with OPFOR indirect fire observers and artillery units or to place your own observers in position might be common place. From simple elimination to destroy-and-seizure missions to grab equipment such as weapons, position materials, radios and so on can be developed.
When under indirect fire attack most cantonal tasks can't be accomplished. Exposed equipment might be destroyed (a good way to keep your PCs lean and hungry and thus ready to go out and adventure).

[ChalkLine]

Here's an article on what food would be available in a Nuclear Winter.

It prompts a lot of questions and the thing about the Twilight War is that it always postulated a 'friendly nuclear war' that wasn't overly destructive. In fact every T2K campaign I've been in on reflection the damage to the fabric of the world probably wasn't as bad as the Second World War and never as bad as The First World War (there's places in northern France that are so contaminated by chemicals from gasses and explosives from The First World War that they kill 95% of plants and are so toxic they probably can't be entered for another 700 years by unprotected people)

However a true Nuclear Winter is a really terrifying setting. A general exchange would probably stop most sunlight reaching the surface of the earth and survivors have about two to three years to get to the equatorial areas and set up enough infrastructure to exist. A campaign set on this isn't just getting back to friendly territory but transiting a whole section of a global hemisphere.
It also is a lot harsher in every respect. Everyone left behind is going to starve or die of exposure. Food supplies are going to rapidly exhausted in that short window of transit because the very next crop is going to fail after the exchange, and its going to fail on a global scale and keep on failing. Players are not going to be able to comparably comfortably wait out the winter months in a canton but instead are going to have to keep moving as the cold starts to set in around the polar latitudes and then move. Endless darkness from the nuclear clouds will make the going tough. Most people will simply psychologically fail and die, unable to move. In fact most surviving people may be even unaware that they have to move towards the equator and this will doom them.

It definitely makes for a different game in every sense. The article says that a general exchange between just India and Pakistan is probably enough to trigger the Nuclear Winter, an exchange between the WTO and NATO is more than enough to do so, even one that only uses a fraction of the combined arsenal.

The biggest problem once the players get moving may just be starting. A general mass movement in an equatorial direction will overwhelm every society on the planet, both those moving and those already at the equators. Players may well need to fight the whole way and the fight for space once they're there and finally fight again against others arriving.

[ChalkLine]

I was just watching a video on Viet Nam and came across an interesting thing that relates a bit to the Twilight War.
(Note that this does not cover every area and time but is simply a broad generalisation.)

After about '68 the Viet Cong (not the NVA) switched tactics. Prior to this they'd been fighting large unit actions and encounters would be in the nature of battles that might run up to days of combat. However the preponderance of US firepower meant that this was a losing proposition. While some of the hard-fought battles might cause large US losses in some cases usually they'd inevitably lose more men and materiel the VC couldn't afford. After '68 they shifted to ambushes to fight an attritional war where combat rarely took longer than ten minutes. Before the US troops could marshal their support the VC would simply withdraw.

This had a strange effect on infantry fighting in that it totally destroyed any ability to manouevre. The US troops would go to ground, call in airstrikes or artillery and then by the time they'd got that sorted the fighting was over. The infantry rarely shifted position from when they'd first been hit. In the vast majority of cases the skilled US infantry didn't flank, didn't suppress and envelope or any of the advanced infantry fighting they'd been taught. They just shot back until the shells landed and then cautiously went over to see if they'd hit anyone. It was a major paradigm shift in combat and many of the soldiers had to relearn the fighting they had to do.

Now, to get to Twilight 2000.
This major shift in tactics will probably happen quite a few times and at varying times in different places. A GM who wanted to have different areas of the war fighting different types of fighting could do so. For instance, during The Siege of Warsaw you might see positional fighting with trenches, barbed wire, mines and artillery duels much like in The Second World War at The Siege of Sevastopol. In my campaign the siege is unsuccessful and NATO never gets into the city but if they did then you shift to the awful 'rattenkrieg' ('rat war') of Stalingrad where there's no armour to be seen and you can fight for days for three rooms of a ruined building while the civilians huddle in the basement. However on the river banks of the Vistula there might be the Mekong Delta hit-and-run tactics mentioned above and between there and the Oder on the plains you might see vehicle manouevre warfare with sweeping movements of mobile mechanised units.
Player characters moving between areas should be confronted with new types of fighting suited to the tactical realities of the areas. Trying to add flavour this way I think would start to differentiate between player backgrounds and experiences. One player might be a survivor of the trenches, another a brown water patroller and yet another a cavalry soldier as an example.

I don't recommend penalising players for being 'out of area' but I do recommend giving players a bonus for a specialty. A point on their initiative and cool for being in a combat situation they're (undoubtedly unwillingly) accustomed to might give a nice touch of difference.

Also this means that players can specialise in something they do quite a lot and the GM can promote their area of expertise. The specialist character might get Idea Rolls to come up with a helpful tactic if they're stuck ('You remember at Warsaw you crawled through a land drain and came out behind the enemy in a similar situation'). I'd use this cautiously as players resent the GM steering their players, it can make them feel a bit like a passenger in the game. But if they don't know what 'mouse-holing' is or what a flank sweep is then I can't see the harm with the GM providing an option.

[ChalkLine]

Here's the description of my armoured train from my campaign for you to use or abuse.

[ChalkLine]

Here's a simple encounter driven scenario that might cover one or two sessions. It's nothing special and is written to be able to slot into any campaign. There's no NPC stats or maps as it's very generic.
On the whole it's here simply to round out a campaign or when you're stuck for ideas one night

[ChalkLine]

While not a standard Twilight 2000 game, I've been doing a bit of wikipedia reading and the idea of various military 'advisers' stranded deep in Africa in the 1990s and trying to fight their way out has suddenly appealed to me.

The premise is that some former troops are contacted by their respective governments to act as advisers for a rebel group in a fictional country and try and overthrow the current government. Once on the ground they realise that the intel they've been given is totally wrong and the situation is far more complex than they were briefed. After a bit of scene setting where they start to realise that they're probably not on the side of the angels (obviously there simply isn't any in this situation) a factional struggle kills the rebel group's leaders and the new leaders have other backers. As this is post-Glasnost I'd probably pick some other nation than Russia as 'bad guys', probably a fictional one as regional governments often fostered rebel groups in each other's territory. (Liberia was infamous for this).

A loyal soldier gets them a warning that the new rebel leadership has targeted them for arrest. Some of the group will be executed as a spectacle and the rest extradited to the rebel's backers for intel. The executed will probably be the lucky ones as the backer's methods of interrogation are similar to those of Idi Amin's.

In true T2K fashion the advisers have to get to an extraction zone with plenty of betrayal and conflict as well as the possibility of using their skills to do what they consider is correct on the way as they're no longer considered 'employed'. Behind them and pushing the plot is a horde of various factions in technicals displaying various levels of the brutality that marked the regional conflicts of that era.

The players start in a situation much like the end of the 5th ID; grabbing whoever and whatever they can and beating feet. The infrastructure in front of them is destroyed by the war and they may even end up cooking fuel.
Worse they may now be seen as something of a liability by their own backers; the shadowy organisations that put them in theatre. How this develops would depend on the plot.

Of course all is not lost. There was some very good people in the area in that time and they might be able to help out. However it would inevitably be a tangled situation as these helpful groups or individuals tried to liaise with each other to provide help or guidance.

[Edit] I actually started researching background for this and the setting was so awful and depressing I simply abandoned it.