In 2022 I ran a campaign of Free League’s new edition of Twilight:2000. After my review I was excited to try it out, but decided to adapt the premise, instead casting my players as American soldiers and refugees of a nuclear war. The campaign involved a roadtrip throughout the mid-Atlantic United States, meeting separatist groups, civilians, and opportunist criminals, and asking some questions about what the fractured national identity of the US would become in the face of such a monumental crisis. After about eight months the campaign ended, somewhat abruptly; the characters had made their way to Lynchburg, Virginia, home of several key players in the country’s nuclear industry but also, more importantly to the characters, a summer camp with about 400 kids who didn’t know when they’d see their parents again. A strong majority of players voted to end the roadtrip there to protect the kids and, after wrapping up some of the local storylines I had prepped, we concluded.

As much as our story came to an end, the American Roadtrip campaign outline for Twilight:2000 is still one I think holds a lot of promise. As time moves on the campaign shifts from survival to reunification, and has the potential to run for quite a few sessions. In today’s Meet the Party, I’ll introduce you to four characters who also exist in the American Roadtrip setting, albeit a different part. These four characters were generated entirely randomly with the lifepath rules in Twilight:2000 and, as a result, this is hardly a balanced party. That said, the lifepath rules generate characters you otherwise would never have written yourself, and have generated for us the story of a bunch of New England misfits who are crossing into the state of New York with a hope, a prayer, and a few guns.

The Premise

The traditional Twilight:2000 campaign takes place in Europe, after a limited nuclear exchange and a failed NATO military operation called ‘Operation: Reset’. The premise of American Roadtrip is a little bit different. Escalating tensions between the US and Russia lead to a full-scale nuclear exchange, effectively starting the apocalypse. However, the age of the Russian nuclear arsenal has led to only about half of the warheads both striking their targets and detonating, so it’s a literal dice roll if any given metropolitan area was hit or not.

When I ran this campaign, the player characters started at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, and were tasked with making their way to Raven Rock Mountain in Pennsylvania, where the president was thought to be sheltering. I built this out as a hexcrawl using a few elements, but the most important thing for the purposes of this article is the factions. While there were US military and Federal loyalists throughout the country, there were also breakaway factions with their own motives. The states of Maryland and Pennsylvania were home to ‘Free State’ movements which considered their state government the highest power they needed to answer to. There was also the Northeast Militia, a coalition of New England states which banded together for protection. Finally, there was New York.

While the campaign I ran moved south, New York State was always intended to be a dangerous territory of split loyalties and factions. New York City was a potent conflict zone with five local factions vying for power around the city’s impact craters, and upstate was an inhospitable mix of local raiders, warlords, and survivalists. It is this cauldron of chaos from which the characters for today arise.

Our four characters are from Burlington, Vermont, and have been deputized by a group of National Guard soldiers stationed at Camp Ethan Allen outside of the city. Their mission is to cross into New York State and make it down to Saratoga Springs, the nearest major city.

Running this sort of campaign is pretty neat. I did a lot of prep for my campaign, including planning out a big swathe of the country and writing a template for determining which cities had been nuked. I then used that template and the online tool Nukemap to add the appropriate dangers for PCs. For this scenario, though, we’re only focusing on the area around the New York-Vermont border, and we can assume that there aren’t any strikes in the immediate area. In my setting New York City was hit, creating much of the chaos, but you as a GM can decide if you want your players to go as far south as Albany and what they’ll find there.

To run this in Twilight:2000, you’re going to use Google Earth, and a hexbin file, available here. This file will overlay 10km hexes onto Google Earth’s map of North America, and along with the Twilight:2000 rules this should give you everything you need. You will have to use your judgment with terrain types, but remember that it is often easier to follow a road if one exists. Also use your judgment with the random encounters, clearly ones with Soviets will have to be recast to fit the milieu. If you want a slightly easier or more lonesome game, you can treat the Soviet cards as ‘no encounter’, but in my experience the vast majority of them can be recast as American separatists or deserters.

Once you have the map almost everything is in place. The premise is stark: there’s been a nuclear war. The mission is simple: Make your way to Saratoga, then report back. Who’s up for this task? Let’s meet the party.

The Characters

So who are the characters in this roadtrip? Mostly Vermont locals; all of them have held a gun, but none have seen combat, save for one. There’s a traumatized soldier, assigned up to Camp Ethan Allen to get some air and cool off. There’s a local doctor, and his former mechanic who he has a fondness for. Finally, there’s the middle-aged bachelor who people in town gossiped about, but who had a perfectly reasonable excuse for never settling down: He’s a CIA spook.

James “Jimmy” Prowse

Age: 32

CUF: D

Strength: B

Agility: A

Intellect: B

Empathy: D

Skills: Tech C, Mobility D, Ranged Combat B, Recon C, Survival C, Command D

Specialties: Computers, Rifleman

Buddy: David Keller

Big Dream: To prove I can still be a Ranger

Jimmy was an Army Ranger until fairly recently, when an accident left him physically and mentally traumatized. He was moved from Joint Base Lewis-McChord to Camp Ethan Allen to undertake a lower stress assignment at the Army Mountain Warfare School. Jimmy was unsure if he was going to be discharged or not until the war started; though he wasn’t called up alongside the guardsmen and other local reservists. Instead, a mentor he was matched to through a local veteran’s support group pulled him aside, revealed his CIA credentials, and explained they were going on a secret mission.

Dr. Alan Fisher

Age: 46

CUF: D

Strength: C

Agility: C

Intellect: B

Empathy: B

Skills: Mobility D, Tech B, Stamina C, Medical Aid A, Driving C, Persuasion C, Survival D

Specialties: Runner, Communication, Linguist, Combat Medic, Field Surgeon, Veterinarian, Forager

Buddy: Ashley Dawes

Big Dream: To see Burlington return to normal

Alan is an archetypal small town doctor. He’s done a bit of everything, even vet care, in his time. When the bombs went off and the power went out, he headed out to the center of town to see how he could help. With several doctors in Burlington and few injuries, he ended up following Ashley, his former mechanic. How they ended up in a group on a scout mission is still unclear to Alan, but it seems exciting! Needless to say, Alan has no combat experience, though he’s dressed a few gunshot wounds thanks to hunting accidents. He is an excellent doctor, and thinks he can handle himself in the woods…emphasis on “thinks”.

Ashley Dawes

Age: 30

CUF: D

Strength: C

Agility: C

Intellect: B

Empathy: A

Skills: Stamina C, Tech B, Mobility D, Driving D, Persuasion A

Specialties: Builder, Mechanic, Interrogator

Buddy: Jimmy Prowse

Big Dream: To make sure my Dad is OK

Ashley is a townie, growing up in a rough and rural part of the state. She worked as a mechanic for years after high school under the mentorship of her father, until she finally saved up enough money to go to UVM. She graduated and got a great paying job right out of school thanks to her earlier experience, but was working barely a year when war broke out. Her Dad is still out in the sticks, and the only person she’s recognized at the emergency center is an old customer, Dr. Fisher.

David “Zero” Keller

Age: 53

CUF: A

Strength: B

Agility: C

Intellect: A

Empathy: C

Skills: Stamina C, Persuasion B, Ranged Combat B, Recon B, Command C, Survival B, Mobility C

Specialties: Scrounger, Psy Ops, Scout, Sidearms, Locksmith

Buddy: Alan Fisher

Big Dream: To become one of the leaders of the Reunited States

David Keller has been in the CIA for 15 years, joining task force on monitoring domestic extremist groups in conjunction with the NSA after a middling few tours as an Army lieutenant. He came to Vermont a few years back, monitoring far-right groups that had started to bubble up in the Vermont woods, but was on the verge of getting reassigned as US-Russian tensions worsened. After the power went out and the dust settled, he walked from his home in Burlington to Jericho Vermont to find the nearest military detachment, a state National Guard unit. It was here that he became the de facto leader of this team of misfits, in part because the Guard commander didn’t want to deal with the possibility of a much more experienced operative who technically never made it past first lieutenant bossing him around. David has some familiarity with the others in the group; he has been mentoring Jimmy in the last few months after his reassignment. It also just so happens that Dr. Fisher is his primary care physician.

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This crew is a motley one, no doubt about it. With only one character with a CUF better than D, combat is going to be a mess at best, and a massacre at worst. Still, all isn’t lost. A good doctor and a good face are there, and three characters have stamina while three have survival. Decent recon and tech ensure you won’t be completely hosed in different situations that arise, and you have a driver as well. One thing I like about a group like this is that it does force you to think about problem solving a bit differently. Combat in Twilight:2000 is brutal, and lucky rolls can ruin your day just as effectively as competent opponents. With an all-soldier group this may mean planning, ambushes, or other clever tactics, but with a mixed group like this it more often means trying not to get into combat at all.

If you want to run a scenario like this, consider whether or not you want a vehicle to be part of the equation. The distance between Burlington Vermont and Saratoga Springs New York is about 110 miles, or 176 kilometers. With a car or truck that’s only a couple days of travel in the T2K rules, meaning a couple random encounters and the core of the city as an adventure site could fit into one session without too much trouble. That same distance on foot takes a good amount more time, though, and between the increased number of random encounters as well as tighter constraints on what the characters can carry, the game is now stretched to a 3 or so session mini-arc. Of course, this could all change very quickly if the vehicle is destroyed, or in the opposite direction if the characters on foot decide to commandeer a vehicle.

Twilight:2000 is a great game, and while American Roadtrip is a bit of a macabre concept thanks to its reliance on global thermonuclear war, it lets you use Google Earth to run a really neat and detailed campaign. If you aren’t from New England like I am, you can recast the campaign anywhere in the country with the same starting premise: go from here to there, find out what happened. As a GM you can either write up an adventure site as described in Twilight:2000, or build up some further campaign threads that will send your characters onto the next phase of their roadtrip. Use your local area knowledge to make your game hit home for your players like no other campaign concept could. Even if your characters don’t look exactly like Jimmy, Alan, Ashley, and David, hopefully these characters, fully randomly generated with the lifepath tool, help give you some ideas of how to tie your group together. After all, it’s not a campaign until you meet the party!

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