ChalkLine's Desiderata

[ChalkLine]

Has anyone had a look at the Romanian Cold War military

It's interesting because Romania wasn't really a very enthusiastic member of the Warsaw Pact and it's army wasn't all that thrilled by the way the country was going and with the Patriot Guards, Romania's territorial defence, even less so. In 1989 the Guards were turned out to repress the people and they promptly made the people's uprising an armed uprising.

The reason I go into this is that Romania had some really nifty kit. It was variants of the Soviet stuff but with a unique twist and some of this stuff actually suits T2K a little bit better in some respects because it's really functional yet robust even for Warsaw Pact standards.

The one I've really been enjoying reading is the ABC-79M, a little recon-APC. The Romanians were already making the BTR-80 and when they saw they needed something like a BDRM recon vehicle they simply cut the BTR-80 down into a four wheeler rather than get stuff from outside the country. These purpose-built variants had a short chassis and the BTR's turret. In retrospect it's amazing no one else thought of it (and it makes you wonder what other vehicles would be like if someone did that).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Republic_of_Romania

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_People%27s_Army)
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriotic_Guards_(Romania))
(https://en.wikipedia.org/.../Equipment_of_the_Romanian...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/.../Pu%C8%99c%C4%83_Automat%C4...
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC-79M)

[ChalkLine]

Tank Riding

Tank riding, or "Infantry Tank Desant" is the practice of riding atop a tank into combat rather than merely for transport. While on the surface this might seem stupid it actually has some slight advantages as it allows the tankers to have more eyes and weapons scanning for threats. However tanks draw fire and the practice of "scrubbing" infantry off tanks rapidly becomes standard.

Now, while most people assume this is purely an eastern Bloc practice this is not the case. The USA for instance has not totally disavowed the practice and reading some field manuals shows that there's actually instructions given on things to keep in mind when adopting this practice.
Of course with things like an M1 series MBT the gas turbine makes riding on the engine deck dangerous in the extreme however there are images of US vehicles carrying infantry on the turret and even the front deck (which doesn't seem wise). This must be either an emergency or a doctrinal shift because the M551 manual strictly bans infantry from riding forward of or in close proximity to the smoke/grenade launchers.

How many troops can you get on your ride
Luckily, there's actually a table for this:

- Heavy tank, 10-12 soldiers
- Medium tank, 8-10 soldiers
- Light tank, 5-6 soldiers
It should be easy to extrapolate from this how many PCs you can get to cling onto a fast moving vehicle as it smashes through urban wreckage and trees that do their best to wipe them off.

[ChalkLine]

BMP-1M, probably the Twilight War standard.

During the 80s we thought the BMP-1 would stay as it is and would be thrown into depots before being issued to third-echelon troops. It seems the Russians, knowing they didn't have the rubles to make the BMP-3 in sufficient numbers, decided to have a hard look at the old war horse.

The big complaint among the many of the BMP-1 was that it was built with another role to the one it now occupies (although that role didn't exist when it was designed). It was only designed to stop shell fragments and rifle calibre rounds, not even having enough armour to defeat the 12.7mm on the sides. This is the vehicle in the rules.

Obviously, this had to change. I could go on about soviet battle concepts, they're quite different to what they led us to believe, but the main thing is that the soviets moved from a "well, we're going to lose men, let's make sure the objective is achieved so it doesn't turn into a slugging match where we'll lose lots of men" theory to a theory where they needed to stop attritional warfare grinding down their troops. This occurred during their Afghan commitment and went fairly unnoticed by the west.

Thus we get the first modernisation; the BMP-1 Afghanka package. This is a survivability package to minimise crew losses. It is a 6mm applique armour package that brings the sides of the vehicle up to a level where it's resistant to 12.7mm armour piercing rounds. They also developed a system where the troops could remove the ATGM from the roof (already upgraded to those used by the latest vehicles) and replace it with a carried Plamya 30mm AGL in a remote mount. If you really want the old 73mm-armed BMP in your game you should be using this one.

However after Chechnya, Afghanistan and watching the west in Iraq the Russians decided that the standard BMP-1 was going to be a rolling coffin in modern combat and embarked on a widespread upgrade to give these vehicles some effective firepower to hold western IFVs at bay.

Here we get the BMP-1M, a very different beast and probably quite a surprise to many people. They turfed out the old turret because they'd come to believe that IFVs were unavoidably going to be involved in urban combat. In its place was put a remote mount, here's the blurb:

"It is fitted with a TKB-799 "Kliver" one-man weapons station armed with a missile pod, a 30 mm 2A72 multipurpose autocannon (it can be used against both ground and air targets) and a 7.62 mm PKTM coaxial machine gun. The missile pod is mounted on the right side of the weapons station and normally holds four 9M133 Kornet (AT-14 Spriggan) or 9M133F "Kornet" ATGMs with a laser jam-resistant fire control system, but these can be removed and replaced by a pod of 9K38 Igla (SA-18 Grouse) surface-to-air missiles. It carries 300 rounds for the main gun, 2000 rounds for the machine gun and 4 ATGMs. It also has a modern computerized fire control system with a two-plane stabilizer and a 1K13-2 telescopic sight with distance measurement/thermal/laser channels and ballistic calculator with external sensors.
Computer simulations proved that the BMP-1M can outperform the American M2/M3 Bradley at firepower efficiency (the tested aspects included ATGM power, the effective range of the ATGM and the autocannon during day and night conditions and launching the ATGM while on the move). In these simulations the BMP-1M won a combat engagement with the M2 Bradley 1.3 times more often."

This beastie was available in 1998 but you can bet your bottom ruble it'd be turning up a lot earlier during the Twilight War.

[ChalkLine]

Do you still have East Germany in your campaign

I've had reunification but before it was made the East Germans shifted stocks of all their gear to other communist nations. This leaves all sorts of NVA kit turning up in odd places.

This causes problems. Also in my game the Germans created several emergency units using residue NVA stocks for service elsewhere. Sometimes these units end up encountering units using old NVA equipment. However the Germans only use Bundeswehr body armour and webbing.

(I also ditched the "French Stab In The Back" gimmick as it's frankly offensive. Instead there's Warsaw pact troops all over Germany and in France)

[ChalkLine]

My players have just encountered this Twilight 2000 refugee vehicle

Goat Cart
Weight: 34kg (75lb)
Capacity: 227kg (500lb)
Uses one goat as a draught animal. Generally constructed from lightweight steel construction and wheelbarrow wheels. In T2K the operator usually walks alongside the vehicle.

This draught vehicle has surprising cross country mobility and is really only limited by the skill in which the load is secured and the balanced nature of the load itself. It generally moves at human walking speed.

[ChalkLine]

Denmark, a much-forgotten NATO member, actually fielded their version of the M41 Walker Bulldog right into the Twilight 2000 period.

Now, it's been covered in some source-books but the salient feature is that it was updated to mid-nineties grade while still keeping the venerable to impressive derivative of the late Second World War US M1 76mm cannon in its 76mm M32A1 form.

Now, this gun is absolutely perfect for Twilight 2000 and I don't use that lightly. The reason is that it's powerful but not too powerful. While powerful enough to see off anything below an MBT the M32A1 isn't so powerful that your players can tear a swathe right across Poland and Germany. If you come up against a T-62 or above you have to pull your head in and go around or become extremely creative in how you deal with it. This means a GM can give the players the effects of modern tank warfare but also have that moment where they look at the two T-80s nosing around the hill an decide that that direction is not worth investigating.

As the Danish M41, the M41DK, has only about 25mm of very well-sloped armour it can tussle with stuff that mounts KPVs but has to be an ambush predator for anything else. Thus the infantry players still have a role as they screen and protect the gun tank. They go in, clear out the RPG teams and look for mines/IEDs so the M41DK can get into position and then it does its job. This sort of combined arms warfare should be the meat and potatoes of T2K fighting.

For play I recommend one player be the TC and give the rest of the crew positions to NPCs. The TC controls the NPCs through his Leadership skill (or equivalent). Still, the GM should do the NPC's rolls or the TC suddenly gets a whole bunch of characters to play and that makes a power disparity for those players who elected to run a PBI out there in the mud. I recommend also a far larger diversity for crew personalities than the cards and training quality. I'd make entirely new characters and base them on someone. This makes the crews much more memorable and stops them being robots that one player controls.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M41_Walker_Bulldog)

[ChalkLine]

Well, last game the players were sneaking across the rainy, muddy Polish fields when they found one of these lying in the mud.

[ChalkLine]

BRDM-2M

What's not to love It's a UAZ with (some) armour!

The BRDM-2M was pioneered by the, uh, "BRDM-2M" but not the Russian one but rather the Polish one.

The Poles noted that even though they loved this thing it had serious flaws. They especially didn't like the way you had to enter and exit the vehicle's deck hatches. The vehicle isn't short so it's a big drop to the ground and they wanted a way to get in and out quickly, it is a scout car after all. You need to get out and scout.

So the Poles had a long hard look at it and decided they didn't need the belly-wheels. Out they went and now not only could they put actual doors just aft of the forward wheels but there was room inside for two scouts as well.

The Russians looked at this and thought the Poles had totally missed the point. Until the Polish vehicles worked so well in actual combat. At that point the Russians also looked at ditching the belly-wheels and adding stuff including the doors and passenger positions. However when they switched to newer radios in the 1990s they noticed that there was now room in the turret due to the smaller systems. Rather than lavish stuff on crew comfort, Russian wars are supposed to be unpleasant, they managed to cram in a mount for the AGS-17 slaved to the main armament and now had something a bit like a M1117.

Okay, new stats:
Same speed stats except the vehicle doesn't have the same obstacle crossing ability the old one had which was remarkable. Now it's just "good".

+1 AGS-17, external mount but belt fed from internal stores. I can't tell you how much ammo it carries for this but I do know the other ammunition stowage is unchanged.
+2 passengers.

(While this might not be all that common, I would make it common though, all the Polish ones had the extra passengers during the period)

[ChalkLine]

Phases of the Twilight War

Note: This is my take and it's not the usual one. I'm not pushing my program but rather throwing this out here for anyone that might find it useful.

By definition the Twilight War is unlike any other. It goes from a state-of-the-art modern peer-to-peer conflict using all weapons possible and winds down to gangs of soldiers wandering around scavenging food and gear. There may well be phases beyond this that simply don't bear thinking about.

The reason this is important as not only will the whole concept of operations change but it will also strongly reflect the legacy equipment left around, something that impacts strongly on the game. In The Second World War Nazi Germany came up with a bewildering array of "Last Ditch" equipment that ranged from the technically advanced to the medieval. There may well be other things sometimes touched on in the game like the M16EZ, that are sprinkled in the campaign.

Some of these phases will not happen everywhere at the same time.

Note: This uses the 1st Edition timeline. (In this the Chinese start a war with the USSR and the West joins in later).

Phase One: Preceding 1995.
The March to War
This is just before the war and it's worth having because otherwise things get left out.
The history states "after a period of increasing tensions". In this stage every future belligerent nation takes stock of the unfolding situation. The USSR and the PRC have switched to full wartime economies. The West has several options but it's likely that every military of the time will defer destroying obsolescent equipment. I place this around 1987+. Plans will be created to have in place systems to rapidly restore "boneyard" and "mothball" equipment however the systems themselves will not be created but rather serious preparations for them. Military expenditure while be increased but not significantly. R&D projects will be increased. Observers will watch the fighting and note technical and doctrinal lessons being learned. Plans will be created for the TO&E of legacy units.

Game effects.
Larger numbers of pre-war equipment will be created. Some gear that is historically from post 1995 will be fast-tracked and will appear in the game earlier.

Phase Two: 1995
Eastern Engagement
The Warsaw Pact and the PRC are now serious and it's now that their modern equipment starts pouring out. The USSR starts creation in the large scale that post-Cold War history associates only with elite units: body armour, night vision gear, squad communications.
NATO starts creating large stocks of modern gear that will be shipped to the PRC next year.

Game Effects:
Apart from a higher level of equipment it is as can be expected.

Phase Three: 1996
The West gets involved.
At this point the West starts arming the PRC (who then shamelessly reverse-engineers most of it) and in a strange reversal of what has happened in the Middle East the Warsaw Pact encounters NATO equipment used by poorly-trained but enthusiastic troops. Large amounts of it are captured and shipped back for examination and the WarPact are appalled at the level of connectivity involved in these modern systems. Crash programs reverse-engineer these in an effort to incorporate them into Soviet equipment and doctrine and these are then tested against the Chinese. (Note that at this time Albania is a Chinese ally flanked by hostile nations. This does not bode well for their future in Europe)
NATO also gets direct doctrinal information on state-of-the-art WarPact gear and the rising level of experience in the Eastern European armies as they get blooded.
Game Effects:
Some late 1990s equipment is already in place due to the experience from the preceding year. I would go so far as to make gear from 2000 to 2005-ish available.

Phase Four: 1997
It All Goes South
In this part Germany partly reunifies and the Western Front opens up.
With the fighting in Germany and the US drive into Poland the fresh but un-blooded NATO troops meet Polish and Russian forces in Poland. These troops have been cycled through the Chinese Theatre and are hardened and experienced in manouevre to the extent NATO does not expect. At this point every nation on the planet starts rearming as fast as they can if they are not already well down that path. With two year's experience on the nature of the fighting advanced systems are created and shipped to the general conflict in Europe. I'm not averse to early 2000s gear appearing here, war is a huge accelerator of technology and this is largely ignored by the canon. Notably the city-fighting means you'll see things like TUSK upgrades for M1s and similar vehicles appear on all sides.
Those programs to rebuild and restore mothballed equipment swing into action. As it's bleedingly obvious that This Is It the West's total manufacturing starts churning out top-of-the-line munitions while also refurbishing everything and anything.

Game Effects:
Out-of-period equipment is put into production. Things such as weapon optics and rails become common. Legacy gear is rebuilt and upgraded to modern standards, if not for Western Theatre use then for holding the line elsewhere and to supply allied nations. All the peripheral builders of proposed but not accepted equipment also swing into action resulting in much of the small-scale stuff sold to minor countries appearing in larger quantities.

Phase Five: 1998
Is Everyone Having Fun
This where we have a lot of to-and-froing and then it all happens as the nuclear strikes hit first tactically and strategically. Industry is smashed and if you were working in a tank factory you became reduced to hot plasma.
Only well-hidden, and rarely then, industry survives. Dispersed equipment stocks are used. The bulk of governmental effort goes into disaster relief.

Game Effects:
Production ceases. It's "make do with what you have".

Phase Five: 1999+
What Do We Do Now
The war continues for some unknown reason, probably because no one tells everyone to stop. This is where the run-down of gear starts in earnest and quickly things like ATGMs start to dry up as they are used out-of-doctrine to hit anything that looks "blowupable". This phase I usually call "The Missile Drought" as the top of the line munitions are expended.
However, the military units are still in business and now the civilian sector (their reason for being) are ash they take over production. It's at this time we see things like rechargeable batteries and low-tech solutions being built in restored factories. The focus is on sustaining the gear they have and not creating new answers. Lower tech solutions are grafted onto high-tech equipment.

Game Effects:
It is here the GM gets a chance to shine. Repurposed and add-on equipment starts to diffuse out to the troops. Also, second-line gear kept in depots replace things like optics that are no longer produced so those Aimpoints start to disappear. Some vehicles are turned into Frankensteins as old systems are shoehorned in to replace newer, destroyed ones. We have to be careful here as older systems are invariably larger, bulkier and heavier and may not fit. It might be common to see armoured boxes welded onto the exteriors of vehicles to mount extraneous systems. Really, by the time the players get a hold of it nothing is standard. It will probably have been upgraded and then part of that in return downgraded, making for some truly unique kit.
Very advanced gear will tend to be more worn out usually as it served longer unless it's been lying under rubble for a few years. An M60A5 with a 120mm gun jammed in but all the MGs are Browning M37s isn't unusual. Maybe it only has a thermal camera for the TC but not the gunner.

Note that autocannon barrels get shot-out faster and it will be common to see worn-out cannons, especially on the more modern ones as they were in combat service longer.

Towed artillery might make a comeback. As the SPGs wear out their weapons might be removed and new mounts created or old mounts repurposed. This goes for any gun-carry vehicle.

Specialist vehicles are going to be repurposed as fighting vehicles. Having an armoured radar vehicle is pointless as is a command post vehicle if it can be used for other stuff. Some turrets can drop in on surprising vehicles or you can simply plonk a weapon on top as the much-loved ZSU-23mm gun has been everywhere. Divisional workshops are the focus of this but it gets steadily more dispersed as the units break up.

[ChalkLine]

Beutefahrzeug (Loot Vehicle)

This was a Second World War German term and these were very common as they were always under-stocked with native vehicles (they really liked Shermans). However, they usually did a few things to them to ease logistics problems.

First off, the replaced the radios if they could. When you think about it this is a no-brainer. Second off they'd usually try at least to replace the secondary weapons. German co-axial machine guns would be shoe-horned in unless it was one of the large amount of units that used captured weapons stocks. In the Cold War the PKM-Ts and the various MAG versions actually aren't that different in size. They'd also often change the cupolas on captured armoured vehicles so the TC had the same capabilities as that of their own vehicles.

In a Twilight 2000 sense all these apply. A T-80 in NATO service would have these modifications as well as the over-size identification markers and probably a large IR marker as well.

As I've mentioned earlier some of them will have retro-fits of NATO sensors to bring them up to standard. Some might even have engine swaps. Soviet engines are notorious for running dirty as they have huge tolerances to cope with massive temperature changes and it's a bit of a fuel waster in a logistical sense. NATO smoke launchers are another probable change (nearly no one uses these in their games).

UK-service vehicles would have had the large reel on the outside to connect vehicles in laager so they could maintain radio silence. There's probably no room for the water-boiler so it'd be a hardship post. Maybe they could mounted a liberated samovar on the outside.

[ChalkLine]

Twilight Smoke Launchers.

(No one uses these in their games)

The standard NATO vehicle smoke launcher is a 66mm grenade. The Warsaw Pact uses the 71mm "Tucha" launcher. Generally it produces a thick IR-defeating smoke and may or may not be based on white phosphorus. WP smoke grenades are simply WP grenades, there's no difference except they have about three to four times or more the payload of a 40mm WP grenade. As they have a very simple fuzing system they have a larger payload percentage.

However vehicles can also launch CS gas, but that's a niche munition.

Early on and its up to you if you want to reintroduce this but vehicles also had the option of fragmentation munitions for these installations. These were often used in urban fighting or other places where the vehicle might be overrun by hostile infantry. Note that the US M34 WP grenade had a fragmentation jacket.

As a rough guide the standard load for smoke grenades was 32 rounds with four to eight being on each side of the vehicle. Some vehicles expected to fight in urban terrain even had them facing in a 360o arc. These munitions are stored internally.

I'm not quite sure of the firing procedure. I know many installations allowed for single and barrage fire. I hope someone can enlighten us on this.

These little fellas go a long way. Here's a diagram from the M551 showing its arc. As is obvious these things present a very real risk to friendly personnel.

[ChalkLine]

This is a really long technical look at what survival would be like for one centre; Krak3w. It is a model for the sort of capability that will be available to anywhere in the Twilight 2000 world. If this sort of boring navel-gazing makes your eyes cross it probably won't be very interesting.

In a spare moment I gave some thought to The Free City of Krak3w. To be precise how its economy works. This is pretty much going to be a critique and then I thought we could workshop an actual real, logical Krak3w.
Note: I'm not disrespecting GDW here. They did a great job on extremely little information. Older posters here will remember just how little information came out of the Eastern Bloc in the Cold War.

Now, disclaimer: I've never been quite sure why the Krak3w authorities thought making a "free city" would be of any use. By definition in Twilight 2000 there's very little travel and what little there is can be handled by normal procedures. In effect they're saying to Lublin "NATO Welcome Here", and you can imagine how well that would go over. Secondly, no matter how well-disposed many people were towards the west before the war that's not going to be the case any more. The west was well-thought of in many places because they offered a lot and didn't do anything overly damaging to Poland, most of the western hatred was focused on Russia and East Germany. Since then in the game NATO has massively nuked Poland. Now, let that sink in. Not only did they invade but they also used nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. NATO has killed an enormous amount of Polish people. NATO PCs will not be viewed as "good guys" by many Poles, and also the activity of NATO marauders will be conflated with NATO troops. (This also goes for other nations, they're probably sick of Russia too, but at least Russia fought alongside the Poles). Now add in anti-NATO propaganda.

In my campaign Krak3w is a very different place to what GDW envisaged. Anyway, that's just an aside.

Now, this might well be far too much detail and nitpicking, but I was wondering how they grow food, produce materials and so on. The reason I do this is because it puts stuff in the world. If there's an ammonium nitrate source it's not only extremely valuable to everyone, you can make fertiliser and explosives with it, but it's really something the players should bounce off. It makes the world real rather than an exercise in rolling on tables.
The first big problem with Krak3w being that you simply can't run industry on a significant scale without significant power generation and the generator listed on page 17 of the source-book brings up a few problems. Firstly, yes you can move a boiler, although they are insanely technical and fragile things, but it also means you have to move the generators, the transformers, and then you have to rebuild the electrical infrastructure hooking it to the grid all while needing a food and security surplus to allow you to apply the personnel to the task.

Nowa Huta had a power plant but that's almost certainly bombed into oblivion (canonically it was vaporised in a triple nuclear strike) and also it ran on brown coal, and that would mean yet another industry required. Worse, the coal came originally from Silesia (it's complicated but Poland had a lot of odd inefficiencies due to Stalin-era requirements of industry going to certain places for political reasons and this meant long supply lines) and of course this isn't going to arrive, even if the plant is both reasonably intact and running at extremely low capacity. The problem with our steam-powered plant is we simply can't fuel it. Wood does not produce enough calories when burnt and also you're going to run out of wood in just a few months. In addition wood is difficult and costly to transport from it's ever-moving harvesting areas.

So, big power is out. So that means small power, and of course you can distil fuel and run that but really it's both inefficient and insufficient to run things like lathes, industrial presses and so on for the likes of the Wojo Mortar Factory that is going to need at least those two pieces of industrial tools and many more.

[Edit: Since then I've researched the Dąbie Power Station, a small hydro-electric station on the barrage (weir) at Krak3w.]

Secondly, it's stated that Krak3w imports most of its food. From where Now, as I said before I don't blame GDW for this but people familiar with modern farming know that there's a massive infrastructure associated with it so you can make a reasonable surplus.

In the 1950s to 1960s there was a thing called The Green Revolution (The Third Agricultural Revolution) when inefficient smaller farms switched over to agri-industry on a massive scale (the Soviets showed exactly how not to do this in the 1920s) and of course that infrastructure is gone in Twilight 2000. Fertiliser, pesticides, the systems for storing and applying those two, and especially the massive infrastructure that revolves around irrigation and its equipment (and the fuel required). Modern farming uses a large amount of fuel. This infrastructure came from central hubs that then went to transportation feeders, both military targets (although food production targeting is a war crime it's usually inevitable collateral damage).
Simply put there is no food for Krak3w to import and there's no way the people nearby could get it there. While "sail it on a barge" is the canonical answer it doesn't really cover the logistics of getting the food from granaries, loading barges with heavy equipment and then fuelling them for the run downriver. Even if it was possible, would Krak3w produce enough for it to be worth it when those people know that cyclical famine is now a thing they have to contend with

So we have no food and no fuel. But that doesn't mean we can't have some sort of large unit in Krak3w running a city.
So, we have to have Krak3w produce enough food and also create a surplus. Luckily, there is a large amount of farmland to the north west of the city, however I can't get a size on this to determine how many people it can support.

Unfortunately potassium and phosphorus do not occur naturally in Poland and along with nitrogen (which is not hard to get with ingenuity) you need all three for commercial surplus level farming. (The Polish government is probably getting all three from Russia which explains their ability to support troops and Germany has sources which explains NATO continuing on). This means the farming production is going to drop to pre-1870s levels.
Now, this was between 0.6 to 2.0 tonnes per hectare in optimum conditions, with the low numbers being for backwards areas with little mechanisation (what there was for the time) and the higher level for optimised areas in advanced countries. It took between 625 and 875 man-hours to produce that amount. Note these are when the mechanisation is gone. Tractors and farm gear will quickly wear out, especially when not lubricated or using poor quality fuel. Even so the immediate loss of fertilisers will be the main reducing factor in output.

Those numbers are only important if you want to go into eye-glazing detail, and that's not even where I'm going and my reputation proceeds me. Instead the basic rule is that 80% of an established population will be engaged in food production. In transient or survival-level farming that number jumps to 95%. In areas that have access to modern farming level technology and infrastructure that plummets but I think only Lublin could manage that locally.

This means that the Krak3w soldiery spends nearly all their time farming and only small patrols and checkpoints guard Krak3w itself. It also means those patrols take away from those running the very inefficient post apocalypse industry and commercial activity. As can be seen almost no one lives in idleness and things like bars and shops will all be part time affairs. It also means the Krak3w troops are going to be centred in the farming areas and more of a reaction force. The centre of Krak3w is going to be a very dreary place as the focus of the city will be on the farming areas.

With food understood and the subsistence level of production worked out we now look at power production. As can be understood fuel is the primary problem. The only really available source is agricultural waste, however most of that is put back into the soil as fertiliser and only a tiny amount will be available to brew fuel. Forestry reduction is available in the short term, this might be where Krak3w is now, but as mentioned above forestry is also a fuel-intensive industry. The two nearest coal deposits are the Lublin Basin, they're not sharing with a rogue unit, and the Upper Silesia Basin which is too far away. However the canal between the two was used as a transport hub and is unlikely to have been directly targeted by anyone. GMs might want to have a resource war between Krak3w and Silesia over the coal at some point.

It now appears that Krak3w on the surface simply can't get the power to run any industry on the scale of a factory capable of making mortar shells (the fuzes are totally impossible), which is rather sad. It is in fact unlikely they'll be able to maintain their equipment and will eventually go under to someone with access to fuel unless the expand to absorb such a region.

[ChalkLine]

Component units in the Krak3w Defence Forces.

(Following on the Krak3w theme)

The unit controlling Krak3w is listed as the "8th Motor Rifle Division", which is actually something of a misnomer. The Polish called those units "Mechanised Divisions"

By the way, I really don't think the 8th are going to disband the colours and call themselves an OTK unit if for no other reason that the local OTK unit was already in place.

Here's the official Order of Battle from 1985:

8th "Dresden" Mechanised Division
- 16th "Dnowsko-Łużycki" Tank Regiment
- 28th "Sudecki" Mechanised Regiment
- 32nd "Budziszyński" Mechanized Regiment
- 36th "Łużycki" Mechanised Regiment
- 4th Artillery Regiment
- 83rd Anti-aircraft Artillery Regiment
- 47th Rocket Artillery Battalion
- 1st Tactical Missile Battalion
- 15th Division Artillery Commander Command Battery
- 5th Reconnaissance Battalion
- 19th Sapper Battalion
- 13th Signal Battalion
- 8th Supply Battalion
- 8th Maintenance Battalion
- 39th Medical Battalion
- 64th Chemical Defence Company

Also, the 8th will be associated with a few other units that would have been in Krak3w. These are:

3rd "Carpathian" Brigade WOP ("Border Protection Troops")
- 264th WOP battalion
- 32nd WOP battalion
- 34th WOP battalion

5th Podhalańska Brygada WOW ("Internal Defence Forces"; "Wojsk Obrony Wewnętrznej")
- command and staff
- three motorized infantry regiments (each with three battalions, a - mortar battery and a battery of guns)
- tank battalion
- 122 mm cannon squadron
- 120 mm mortar squadron
- 57 mm AA cannon squadron
- reconnaissance company
- company of sappers
- chemical company
- communications company
- traffic regulation company
- medical company

Krak3w Territorial Defence "Bartosz Głowacki" Regiment. ("OTK").
- command and staff [4] .
- 4-6 infantry companies each with 3 infantry platoons and a heavy machine gun platoon
- special company including sapper platoon, communications platoon and chemical platoon
- supply platoon
This is who we think the "ORMO" were. They are the local military defence unit.

Krak3w Civil Defence Units ("OP") Obrona Cywilna PRL
Don't underestimate these people, this is what every civilian is more or less part of. As Poland was a communist country they subscribed to the "People's War" concept and everyone had a role to play in the conflict. If you had nothing else you could do the OP took you.

Krak3w Militia ("MO") This was the pre-war police force. It must be remembered that Polish police were paramilitary.

One unit you'll notice that are not here is the local ORMO units. This is because the ORMO was an arm of the Polish communist party, the guys the 8th are rebelling against.

Also I should belabour the point that Polish society in the Cold War was more militarised than what we in the west (assuming the reader is western) are used to. Some sort of civil training was very common. Civil Defence was especially widespread. Note that "civil defence" meant just that; not only did they do disaster relief and medical services but the OP also did things like create strongpoints, assist AA weaponry and other military functions.

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Running Text-Based Twilight 2000 Games.

Many times we've all been stinging for a game but can't organise a tabletop campaign. T2K is by definition more of a campaign game due to its resources management and travel focus so one-off games usually don't do the trick. As such we often think "hey, I'll just run this online on RPOL or something". Lots of people have, and I encourage you to join one, but what makes it difficult to run in a one-off session is also what makes it very hard to play as a play-by-post or play-by-e mail game. This is because the medium is incredibly slow.

I mean *really* slow. It took me five years to run a very detailed game with two to three "Turn Posts" a week to get the players together, do a small investigation, clear a small group of marauders from the environs of a bridge and then deal with a counter attack. So this brings us to our first rule:

Keep It Small

You have to have small, compartmentalised adventures. They have to be easily resolvable because you will have players either go missing for a while or disappearing entirely. A long campaign is simply impossible given the level of detail that T2K involves unless you are going to gloss over much of the richness of the campaign.
So instead of a long adventure you instead have several small adventures that link to each other. The idea here is that if the thing goes on too long some players will simply become too fatigued to deal with it and drop out. This also gives the players a bit of autonomy; they finish up one area and then can choose the next direction from the choices you give them. Always keep in mind what the next scenario will be however, because here is where the next thing comes in:

Foreshadowing

This goes for any game but is vital for text games. "Foreshadowing" is a literary term for where the writer introduces a plot element early so the reader gets used to it and when it finally features in the script it seem natural that it should occur. If your next scenario features marauders then have survivors of one of their attacks be a feature of some of the NPCs. This links the scenarios together in more ways than just exploration. Foreshadowing is great for mysteries, introducing NPCs and laying the groundwork for large events. Due to its plt-setting nature it makes things seem like to campaign is "alive" and doesn't freeze when the players turn their back.

That leads to the next bit:

The Living Campaign

Because text-based games have to be very focused and you have to provide lots of information in an economical form that doesn't make the reader's eyes glaze over, the important work of giving the feeling that the world is alive and doing other things has to dealt with in most posts, it's not something you can forget and just dump on the players later. In a firefight they should hear artillery off in the distance. When travelling they might hear shooting in the hills or see tracers at night. This needs a bit of practice because it can also be distracting and confusing, the player suddenly doesn't know if a mortar duel twenty kilometres away is landing on their convoy or not. Have one of the last surviving helicopters fly across the far north, its rumbling rotors waking them from their sleep. In one game I had a trio of cruise missile flash over the brigade they were in and keep going. They were headed for France but the players never found that out.

Firm Rules.

Finally I'm going to post my two-decade old play-by-post rules here. Each has a little explanation of why the rule was needed that is usually omitted from the rules page when I play.

Jim's Play-By-Post Rules

1) Do Not Meta-Game
"Meta-Gaming" is where a player uses information or knowledge not available to their character.
This is not that much of a problem any more and usually is exhibited by excited and enthusiastic players. As text-based games are slow many players try and be in as much action as possible or access information (such as another player spotting a sniper but being unable to warn his companions) that is not available to them.

2) Do Not Lie to, Cheat or Steal From Other Characters.
The basic social agreement of gaming is that players will work together. The game is dangerous enough for the characters without their colleagues actively trying to get them killed. Also note that while this sort of behaviour might seem like fun role-playing many players approach this as a relaxation from such behaviour. Please be considerate.
This is a new rule because, hey, I'm 56 and what was cool and edgy when I was 20 is tedious and offensive now.

3) Be Aware Your Actions Have Reactions.
You are not an island, mistreating NPCs will eventually get out, you will find it difficult to interact peacefully with the world if you have a reputation for torture or murder. It's a tough world but there are obvious over-reactions that will impact negatively on your reputations, you have been warned.
I'm not a big believer in making examples of players but sometimes you have to show that the PCs are not always the biggest dog in town, and if they have a bad reputation those big powers will seek them out.

4) You may NOT kill or attack with intent to harm another PC without prior GM approval.
The GM reserves the right to make an empathy roll, if you fail this roll you cannot bring yourself to harm the other player, although you're more than welcome to be bitter and nasty! The GM may well re-roll this without your knowledge as time and the campaign goes on, so you may 'be pushed too far' and be told that you are ready for violent confrontation, but PCs aren't permitted to open up on other PCs willy-nilly.
I use the Cyberpunk 2020 rules (without classes) and one of the statistics is "Empathy". This statistic is you interpersonal stat and is quite important in play, and it's also the sort of "shield" the players has against becoming the evil they strive against. While I hate alignments I think we can all agree that evil really does exist in the world and generally the players are opposed to it. I had to boot a guy who just up and shot another PC during an argument over a triviality, and then another guy used the new 'no attack' rule as a way of sheltering his own poor interaction, thus it was modified again. I try and make it clear that while a player knows that a gun can only do so many "hit points damage" the *character* only sees a deadly weapon.

5) Turns: The GM posts Two times a week, Australian Tuesday and Friday
You must have your response in before then or you are NPC'd for that turn. If you miss three turns without telling anyone, your PC is 'walked offstage' and out of the game. If something catastrophic has occurred, your PC is then brought back on when you can play again.
Turn Posts are different to just posting. The Turn Post moves the action along and is exactly the same as ending a round of combat, and is used for just that during combat. This gives players a firm idea of when things have to be achieved by and how long they can discuss things. Also, people were dropping out without warning or not responding and holding up turns for weeks. I picked twice a week because I had those days off more than any other reason. We had a guy who had a house fire, so you could hardly blame him for not posting, but others just vaporised and I needed a system for everyone to know when they'd be cut out. After this I always was given good warning that a player would have to miss turns

6) Players MUST answer other players
You should always answer any speech directed at your character, even if it's to only post something like 'I ignore John.'
If this isn't instituted some players aren't answered and are stuck waiting for a response, missing turns and slowing everything down. Sometimes this turns into the dreaded 'talking to the air' where players address the air rather than be held up.

7) PCs must NOT 'think aloud' about other PCs. Never post 'Fred thinks John is a total jerk, his plan is stupid and will get them all killed.' etc. It's cowardly, the other player gets no right of response, role-play out your differences and resolve them on the board, that's the name of the game.
We had a rash of this; I had to stamp on it because I was getting a lot of off-list complaints. It's a pernicious thing that many players fall into, the other way of doing it is the PC speaks to an NPC while well away from everyone else, but it amounts to the same thing.
- When in combat, post a combat summary after your post.
The summary looks like:
Who you are,
Where you are,
What you're using,
What you're doing.

Such as:
Private John
In the ditch, crouching, by the wrecked BTR.
M16A2, 5 magazines
Covering Private Fred's advance to the gully.

9) A Rules-Speak Paragraph is A Good Idea.
If you post a long and descriptive turn, you may want to follow it by a 'rulespeak paragraph' after your turn - but before your summary - if you're concerned the GM may get it wrong. Don't skimp on your descriptions, they're the meat of the game, but sometimes a quick clarification of the 'round 1: run to barn, round 2: ready bow, round 3: shoot at brown-haired bandit makes things amazingly easier for me to GM out and I hate it when I make mistakes about your intentions.
I know it's hard to come up with thrilling narrative every turn, but please try and make longer posts of good descriptions of your actions for a few reasons. Firstly, they get me really enthused to write the story for you. Secondly, they add so much to the game. Thirdly, fifteen separate posts of "yes", "no", and "maybe" tends to "spam-out" people in different time zones, they get up and there's a hundred posts of drivel that they can hardly inject themselves into. It also is amazingly confusing to GM.

10) Trim your posts.
Only have in your post the text that you are responding to or relates to your post, and only respond AFTER the text and not before.

11) Colour Your Speech.
When your PC talks, the text of his comments should be enclosed within inverted commas and the text should be Blue, this is so other players can sort your conversation from your descriptions. However, if a character thinks something they are written the same way but they are in italics; "such as this."

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What sort of add-on units we could attach to the the 5th

This wouldn't contradict canon at all, it would be an interesting addition and give players other choices when starting.

My first thought would be a unit do attach orphan NATO units to. Some sort of umbrella unit.

The next would be somewhere to put ex-Warsaw Pact troops in the same manner. Once again they'd have their own organisational charts. (In 1st Edition the East Germans might have an odd tension on who wants them)
Finally we can make up some purely T2K units that deal with farming, battlefield reclamation and fabrication.