Quote from: Itachi on November 27, 2020, 08:53:20 PM

Quote from: Heavy Josh on November 27, 2020, 06:57:53 PM

Quote from: Itachi on November 27, 2020, 02:48:01 PM
Thanks for the info. The backstory does sound kinda lame indeed.

How easy is it to purge all that and use only the mechanics? (I would probably use it for some Stalker-like slavpocalypse anyway).

Hehe. Slavpocalype.

Pretty easy, honestly. The mood and tone are just right.

Thanks! Are you Slav by the way? It wasn't my intention to sound offensive. I'm just a junkie for that kind of fiction.

(I've read Roadside Picnic twice, watch Stalker the movie thrice and played the videogames for hundreds of hours  )

No no, not Slav. I just hadn't heard the term before, but I knew exactly what you meant. 

https://www.vitalykuzmin.net/

I was a big fan of 1e and have everything released for it. Kind of meh on 2e. But the mechanics of Free League's previous games (MY0/Coriolis/TftL/Alien/etc.) leaves me cold to the idea of this new edition, and if the history of the setting has been changed as has been written about here, then I'm just going to have to sigh and take a hard pass.

Quote from: Heavy Josh on November 26, 2020, 03:22:52 PM
So, the Alpha rules dropped today for Twilight:2000 by the Free League.

It's very pretty. And looking through the rules, I get a good sense of the post-apocalyptic world that the writers are trying to set up. Lots of game-able stuff for diseases, starvation, all that good stuff.

What's clear to me upon reading the history/set-up is that the writers are absolutely lost at sea. There's a lot of stuff missing in their write-up: nothing on China & Southeast Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, Turkey and the Black Sea region, Balkans, and Persian Gulf, to name a few important geo-strategic places that seem to be missing.  Instead, we get the Russians invading the UK in 1999, Northern France is now a radioactive wasteland, and in 1998 the Syrians, supported by the USSR, attack Israel, which responds by using tactical nuclear weapons on the West Bank to stop the invasion. There's lots and lots on Poland, which is good. We also get a lot of stuff on Sweden, which is neat, sure. There's more written about Sweden here than the USA, which I suppose is to be expected.

I'm totally fine with some gonzo stuff, but I'm disappointed. It's the Alpha though.

France getting nuked means the 2300AD timeline must be junked, which would be a negative point for me (as the 2300AD setting is one of my favourite things in SF ever, not just RPGs). Although I suppose I can't really criticise them for not writing exactly the game I would have wanted.

From what people are saying, it seems the background might have some plausibility fails. That is a shame. I don't understand why professional RPG companies struggle with this. Not asking for a PhD level analysis, but it can't be that hard to find a consultant with enough knowledge of history and geopolitics to write something functional for people who read things other than comic books and RPGs. I never bought Twilight 2013 but apparently its background is laughable.