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So I'm starting a new Twilight:2000 game soon, and I've got a few random thoughts I'll share.

First of all is the rules themselves.  Despite coming out in 1985, T2k feels very very much like original D&D.  So much so that it has six core attributes that closely mirror D&Ds, and stat generation is much like D&D's (roll 4d6 for each).  However you drop 4 - so if you roll, say, 19 - 5, 4, 5, 5, - it becomes 15.  Plus you can Favor up to 3 attributes, but you have to Slight an equal number of attributes (so if you Favor 3, you have to Slight 3).  There's math involved here but basically you can "bump" 3 stats up but you have to reduce 3 other stats using the formulas.

There's a percentage skill system that's pretty easy to use - roll under on d%.  Skills are bought at half cost, full cost or double cost depending on where they fall inside your character's background.  Plus certain military specializations give you skill discounts (e.g., if you're a tanker, Heavy Weapon and Drive Tracked Vehicle come at half cost).

But to get back to the original D&D comparison...rules in the set are very, very sparse.  Character generation (which is admittedly very involved and not very well explained) comprises 99% of the rules the Players Manual has in it.  There's a LOT of supplementary sheets for equipment that could have and should have been in a 3rd book, like OD&D's "Monsters & Treasures".  Combat rules are mostly the purview of the Gamemaster's Manual, as are notes for campaigns, and so on.  

The game itself is rooted in military role-playing but while it creates a military structure and background for your character, it doesn't then say "Designate one person in the group as the commander, they issue orders".  Rather, the disaster that befalls the remnants of the US Army as the game's premise immediately take away the whole structure of "Well we've got to do what HQ wants us to" railroad and instead puts the game in a sandbox.  Essentially, the remnants of the Soviet military overrun the last US division's rear areas including HQ and as there is a massive retreat through Poland, the final order you hear is "Good luck, you're on your own."  

With that the players are put in a "sandbox" of Central Europe where central governments have broken down, NATO high command is incommunicado, and battle lines just don't exist any more.  A group can meet a band of happy deserters of Soviet origin who'll gladly trade with them and warn them about dangers down the road, or be ambushed by a savage ex-NATO marauder group who, despite wearing US, UK, FRG and Canadian uniforms have no qualms about shooting every last PC in the party to take their stuff.  Given that you're dealing with local barons and lords instead of a centralized government, the comparison to D&D is, in my opinion, pretty apt.

Speaking of "stuff", since the nuclear war of 1997 has cut almost all resupply lines back to the US (and nothing's being produced there anyway, the US needing to get back on its feet), just like in D&D rare and powerful weapons can be discovered.  Where D&D has the +2 arrows of dragon slaying, in Twilight:2000 it might be a crate of reloads for your Tankbreaker (nee Javelin) launcher.  

As much as I like the game, it isn't perfect by any stretch.  Until I get a good feel for it, vehicle combat (or combat versus vehicles) is going to seem clunky.  Also, and this delves deep into the background, later authors turned the game towards misery tourism.  I don't suggest that a post-nuclear war America (or anywhere else) would be a picnic, but the US sourcebook Howling Wilderness and the later Twilight:2000 timeline (which GDW clumsily tried to patch into 2300 AD I guess to make the "end" of T2k seem not so terrible) has (for example) the US population in 2001 as 95% gone.  That's just absurd, to me, and something I'll be adjusting quite a bit.  In fact there's not a lot of HW I will actually use.  I'd prefer my game not be The Road, but a bit more like Jericho.  But, of course, that's the beauty of any RPG, it's up to the individual GM.

So, in a nutshell...Twilight:2000 is like OD&D but modern with guns and a tweaked character generation system and Outdoor Wilderness thrown in the mix, as there's very little in the way of "dungeon crawling".  It's almost exclusively a hex-crawl.

I had huge fun with T2k back in the day. I'd play it again with the right group. In fact, the RPG I am working on right now is very much my version of T2K in space.

It's an incomplete game, in both a good way and a bad way. The bigger problem were the military wank players who couldn't stop masturbating over the gun stats. If you can avoid those guys, its an awesome game.

We always ran it like The Road. The US soldiers were invaders, outnumbered and caught in a situation akin to the Black Death. Society has collapsed, the thin veneer of civilization is gone, the skies are dark with radioactive dust and Eastern Europe's psycho barbaric past is coming back with a vengeance.

Also, remember the movies of the time T2K came out - The Day After, Red Dawn, Gallipoli and Das Boat, soon followed by Platoon and Full Metal Jacket.

Did they ever come out with a new T2k edition? Any good?

Interesting, thanks.

Re 95% fatalities - even the Soviet-propaganda Pergamon Press stuff I used to read (Nuclear War: The Aftermath) didn't seem to predict a die-off more than about 60% for the US, probably much less. The UK and West Germany were going to really suffer, though.

Quote from: Spinachcat;592532Did they ever come out with a new T2k edition? Any good?

Twilight 2013 came out a few years ago and combined a clunky, odd system with an improbable back story.   I bought most of the line when it went on sale at RPGNow, and was just really disappointed in everything.  It didn't evoke any desire to play at all and was just kinda there.  

Mongoose has the license now, but hasn't done anything with it yet.

I would love to run or play in an original Cold War themed campaign, but could never get the player interest.

Quote from: Dave;592543Twilight 2013 came out a few years ago and combined a clunky, odd system with an improbable back story.   I bought most of the line when it went on sale at RPGNow, and was just really disappointed in everything.  It didn't evoke any desire to play at all and was just kinda there.  

Mongoose has the license now, but hasn't done anything with it yet.

I would love to run or play in an original Cold War themed campaign, but could never get the player interest.

T2k13 came and went - it was one skull airskimmer and powered armor suit shy of being full Siembieda level crazy, plot-wise.  I'll stick with 1.0's "Alternate Future" timeline, thanks.

Rules wise, though, I couldn't say about T2k13.  I know someone who helped playtest them and he liked them a lot, but the metaplot put me off so badly I never took a 2nd look at them.

I played both 1st edition and 2nd edition Twilight: 2000.  Had lots of fun.  I preferred the 2nd edition rules more than the first.  For one, vehicle combat wasn't near the nightmare it was in 1st edition.  Multiple rules worked better in 2nd edition.  1st Editions modules were much more interesting, however.  Most of the European adventure modules were particularly good.

You post-apoc Twilight players...do you know about the Juhlin forums for Twilight: 2000?

If not, google them and check them out.

Quote from: S'mon;592535Interesting, thanks.

Re 95% fatalities - even the Soviet-propaganda Pergamon Press stuff I used to read (Nuclear War: The Aftermath) didn't seem to predict a die-off more than about 60% for the US, probably much less. The UK and West Germany were going to really suffer, though.

The 1e boxed set background as written has a tit-for-tat nuclear war of attrition, with neither side willing to send 2400 warheads over the pole for fear of really destroying the world for good.  So the implication is that it's a few hundred strikes on either side, with Europe and China really getting pasted but good, and neither side willing to use any more weapons as industrial and agriculture having suffered so much.

Then Howling Wilderness came along and...yuck.

Quote from: Grimace;592597I played both 1st edition and 2nd edition Twilight: 2000.  Had lots of fun.  I preferred the 2nd edition rules more than the first.  For one, vehicle combat wasn't near the nightmare it was in 1st edition.  Multiple rules worked better in 2nd edition.  1st Editions modules were much more interesting, however.  Most of the European adventure modules were particularly good.

You post-apoc Twilight players...do you know about the Juhlin forums for Twilight: 2000?

If not, google them and check them out.

Yah, I post there a lot as raketenjagdpanzer (which is a Kanonenjagdpanzer Jaguar with the 90mm main gun and mantlet removed and a TOW-IIb or Euromissile HOT launcher as anti-armor, just FYI).

I'm going to try out some vehicle combat this weekend.  Should be interesting.

Twilight 2000 has long been on my list of games I'd like to run/play in, but have never found a group for. (Dark Conspiracy, coincidentally also by GDW, also makes the list.)

About 7 years ago, I came up with a "Twilight 2010" scenario, just for fun. It involved an inverse scenario, with the EU interning US units, and the US forces trying to escape into allied Poland, fighting EU forces along the way. War, nukes fly, etc.

Now, seeing Iran moving towards nukes, a "Twilight 2020" game could be possible. Iran v. Israel, US intervenes over Security Council objections, Russians get angry, war, nukes fly.

That'd be a viable setting. And leaving players stranded in the middle of Iran, trying to make their way to Europe, would be an interesting twist on the original campaign.

Just some thoughts...

I played 2nd edition back in the day and liked it a lot as a player. Although I was like 11 or 12, I played with my older brother and his friends.

I still have the box plus the module for Florida (can't recall the name right now).

It IS like DnD though. Just imagine finding a G11 and some crates of caseless ammo (a gun that never jams?!)

We rarely played outside of vehicles though. I loved the vehicle combat.

Fast forward 20 years and I thought, "Hey! Maybe my gaming group would want to try this out for a change of pace!" So I open the box, and I see that I need to find the square root of something to determine a stat.

Closed the box and put it back on the shelf.

I still like the setting, but I could homebrew something far less complicated. Makes me wonder just what houserules we used back in the day.

I didn't see any square root/algebraic function stuff in the character generation rules.  The only places it gets heavily mathy are Favoring or Slighting characteristics.  They present fairly simple character generation rules badly, that I will give you.

It's like D&D (to me, if you don't like D&D this won't sit well with you) : it's a good enough game that it's worth puzzling out the mechanical greeblies to have a good time with.  I'm blessed with just enough spare time that it's not a big deal.  Plus this is going to be PbP so it's not as though I'm going to be sweating at the table flipping back and forth through the rulebook, holding up 10 minutes of gameplay to reason out some of the fuzzier rules :)

If someone is going to play through though I highly recommend giving the rules a thorough reading a few times to get to grips with them (I'm doing so currently regardless).

Like 2300AD, this is a setting I want to like, but the dated geopolitics grate me to no end. Silly, I know, but there you go.

Still, I'd love to use it as a base for a gritty post-apocalyptic game. No aliens, no zombies, no robots, no Rapture, no mutants. Just men, the ultimate monsters.

Mongoose Traveller would do in a pinch, or BRP.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;592600Yah, I post there a lot as raketenjagdpanzer (which is a Kanonenjagdpanzer Jaguar with the 90mm main gun and mantlet removed and a TOW-IIb or Euromissile HOT launcher as anti-armor, just FYI).

In the early 80's you watched Wally George, didn't you?  :D

Quote from: thedungeondelver;592598The 1e boxed set background as written has a tit-for-tat nuclear war of attrition, with neither side willing to send 2400 warheads over the pole for fear of really destroying the world for good.  So the implication is that it's a few hundred strikes on either side, with Europe and China really getting pasted but good, and neither side willing to use any more weapons as industrial and agriculture having suffered so much.

Then Howling Wilderness came along and...yuck.

NATO nuclear war doctrine involved gradual escalation, flexible response etc. Soviet nuclear war doctrine was "fire everything we have as fast as we can" - preferably first, since they had limited second-strike capacity. But even with thousands of warheads landing on the US, much of the population would survive; probably most of it.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;592319(which GDW clumsily tried to patch into 2300 AD I guess to make the "end" of T2k seem not so terrible) has (for example) the US population in 2001 as 95% gone.  That's just absurd, to me, and something I'll be adjusting quite a bit.  

You do know that the 2300AD Background was developed from taking the Twilight 2000 situation, turning it into a strategic wargame, and playing it out with a lot of players from 2000 AD to 2300AD. Then writing down the result.

Well, I'd run it with GURPS or Rolemaster Black Ops personally but the set up has always been very playable.  A limited nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States seems pretty plausible these days anyhow.  Heck the Russian government wouldn't even need to be the trigger men.  It could just be terrorists seizing a couple launch sites in former soviet republics and letting lose to force the US to get involved in some local conflict.

Mind you, I did run a GURPS one-off where the PCs were Canadian special forces fighting scavengers and raiders in the ruins of Medicine Hat after a Neo-Communist revolution failed in Russia and resulted in the renegades seizing parts of Northern Alberta.  The only real rationale was that the Copplestone Neo Soviet miniatures are too cool to have on the other side of the world in a collapse scenario.

Quote from: David Johansen;592843Well, I'd run it with GURPS or Rolemaster Black Ops personally but the set up has always been very playable.  A limited nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States seems pretty plausible these days anyhow.  Heck the Russian government wouldn't even need to be the trigger men.  It could just be terrorists seizing a couple launch sites in former soviet republics and letting lose to force the US to get involved in some local conflict.

Mind you, I did run a GURPS one-off where the PCs were Canadian special forces fighting scavengers and raiders in the ruins of Medicine Hat after a Neo-Communist revolution failed in Russia and resulted in the renegades seizing parts of Northern Alberta.  The only real rationale was that the Copplestone Neo Soviet miniatures are too cool to have on the other side of the world in a collapse scenario.

That's pretty cool; I've tried it with different systems (d20, Hero, Silhouette) but I really wanted to give the actual rules a go and I'm finding I like them - so far.  I haven't hit any true WTF?! moments in how they play.  Also, to me, the idea of a USSR that didn't fall and a Cold War that eventually went hot is pretty appealing from a gaming standpoint with me being a child of the 80s.  This is what we expected to happen (I mean, the game was written from '82-'85 so...)

How was 2013 Batshit Fucking Loco?
How was the system?

We played some of the 1st ed back in the late 80s. The group was fun, I don't recall the rules getting into the way. My particular character was a crap rifleman, so I cursed the dice often. I blew things up pretty well tho.

Played quite a bit more of the 2nd edition, which was a different set of rules, but kept the same 'sandbox'.

I actually never had an issue with the population loss in Howling Wilderness. I'm by no means any kind of expert, but think about it.

There were like 50+ nuke strikes on the US looking at the map. Considering our national power grid is fragile and non-hardened, that would pretty much fry everything. No way to make replacement parts to get the power up and running. All the food in the grocery stores would rot within days without the refigeration, and most folks have food for maybe a week inside their home, I don't see how many urban folks would survive at all.

Add to that the drought mentioned over the midwest to kill the crops for the few people who actually know how to grow things, and it could be that the scenario in HW might be actually a little brighter that the background suggests.

I've never looked it quite like Post-Apoc D&D as you mentioned in the original post, but I can certainly see that in hindsight.

Quote from: TristanH;593079There were like 50+ nuke strikes on the US looking at the map. Considering our national power grid is fragile and non-hardened, that would pretty much fry everything. No way to make replacement parts to get the power up and running. All the food in the grocery stores would rot within days without the refigeration, and most folks have food for maybe a week inside their home, I don't see how many urban folks would survive at all.

Rationing? The USA is by far the world's biggest food exporter. You just need to keep enough food moving from where it is (agricultural areas) to where the population is. Surviving government elements could commandeer all gas, transport etc if necessary, although judging by Hurricane Katrina they might be better off leaving it to Walmart.

I'd expect that in the aftermath of a successful* Soviet first strike there would be (a) tens of millions dead in the major population centres and (b) mass hunger and some starvation. Eventual 30-60% fatalities seems plausible - I would expect at the low end, but there are a lot of variables. That's 80-160 million dead in the US. But nothing like 95%. Even the UK would not have had 95% losses, though we would have had it far worse than the US; 2/3 losses would have been very plausible for us, whereas that would be an extreme high end estimate for the US.

Anyway Twilight: 2000 was supposed to have a limited nuclear war, very unlikely IMO. I think this was more to make Europe more playable. In an actual nuclear war with use of battlefield nuclear artillery there would not be much of a playable environment left in the actual warzone.

*Several thousand MIRV warheads hit the US, each averaging around 0.5 megaton yield AIR, destroying the major population centres and many military, scientific, logistical centres and transport hubs.

Edit: On total aftermath deaths, the biggest factor might be the weather. A cold winter would mean vastly higher death totals in northern/colder states. I remember in the '80s thinking about my parents' remote farmhouse in the Grampian mountains of Scotland. It would survive the initial exchange, the nearest likely nuclear strike would be on RAF Kinloss (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Kinloss) base about 30 miles away. It has its own water and power, and there's plenty of wood in the surrounding forest.
But on reflection, stuck up a mountain seems about the worst possible place to be during a civilisational collapse.

Quote from: S'mon;593142Rationing? The USA is by far the world's biggest food exporter. You just need to keep enough food moving from where it is (agricultural areas) to where the population is. Surviving government elements could commandeer all gas, transport etc if necessary, although judging by Hurricane Katrina they might be better off leaving it to Walmart.

That's the thing. The game assumes the Soviets hit the refining centers in the US. There's not much fuel for transporting food to the population centers, and it'll be some time before they get more. The game talks about moving the urban population to the rural food producing areas. Again, I'm not sure the government would do that. Eventually, perhaps. By that time, who knows how many are left. Best keep the fuel for "emergency use".

You mentioned a cold winter. That's what happened that very winter in the timeline.  Flipping through it again (haven't looked at the book in years. yay, thread!), 52% of the population died between 1997-2000 or 135.2 million (at the time). It's a pretty bleak outlook either way, I just feel looking at our reliance on electricity in the modern world that the casualty list would be at least that or higher.

Winters, yeah sometimes rough, but in a post-apoc US there literally tons of shit to burn and no one to care if you do.

Summers however, without adequate water supply - people are going to be dropping left and right until they figure out how to live in a world without AC and tapwater.

Quote from: CRKrueger;593063How was 2013 Batshit Fucking Loco?
How was the system?

Well it uses a dice pool of d20s...I didn't get much further than that...I hate dice pools with a passion...I'll ship you a copy for $15.

One thing you could do to avoid the nuclear wasteland thing is to switch the timeline a bit.  By 1978, say, both sides figured out that being the lone superpower on a glowing cinder waiting for the last remnants of humanity to die horribly wasn't much of a victory.  Plus, the Russians always seemed fairly interested in conquering America and converting it to Communism rather than just destroying it and making all the resources unusable for 6,000 years.  Starting around 1979 or 1980, both sides started swapping out nuclear warheads for neutron warheads, the development of which was much more advanced than in the real world.  They were able to produce a higher radiation output with a smaller explosive reaction, further limiting property damage.  The bursts created a greater quantity of neutrons, but they weren't as potent; also, it was more unstable, and low air bursts would occasionally produce a similar degree of fallout as a standard nuclear weapon, although the half-life was on the order of a few months to a year rather than a few millennia.  By 1996, the upgrades had not been completed, leaving a number of warheads still carrying a nuclear payload.  By '97, when the timeline suggests the strikes occur, there had even been some progress in a missile that produced an EMP blast almost exclusively, although some residual radiation and damage from the burst still resulted.  These were sent first, knocking out some of the first launch capabilities on both sides, followed by the neutron warheads, then a few standard tac-nukes to make up for the neutron warheads that had been disabled.

Naturally, there would need to be some refinement and a bit of tweaking to make it work really well, but this provides for devastation without ignoring what would be a near constant high-level to lethal dose of radiation that would eventually cover the majority of Europe, Asia, and America.  Chernobyl made it around the world twice, and that wasn't even an explosion.  Hence, some areas would still be irradiated from nukes, some areas would be safe from radiation but swarming with disease from all the corpses, and some of those would still have some radiation danger.  The initial EMP strike areas would have been abandoned, leaving all kinds of non-electronic gear for the taking, and the PCs won't be the only ones to realize that.  It opens up a good deal more possibilities without handwaving the nuclear fallout problem away, but still allows for its presence when desired.

Quote from: The Butcher;592726Mongoose Traveller would do in a pinch, or BRP.

We had a group in the 90s that really disliked the T2K system, but loved the setting so I just run the short campaign with Book 4 Mercenary and the Classic Traveller rules. It worked great.

Quote from: StormBringer;593249Naturally, there would need to be some refinement and a bit of tweaking to make it work really well, but this provides for devastation without ignoring what would be a near constant high-level to lethal dose of radiation that would eventually cover the majority of Europe, Asia, and America.  Chernobyl made it around the world twice, and that wasn't even an explosion. .

Chernobyl caused elevated levels of radiation, but away from the reactor core there's no evidence that it actually harmed anyone, certainly not anyone hundreds of miles away. Similar with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There's no reason to think that a nuclear war would cause lethal radiation levels globally.

Quote from: TristanH;593195The game talks about moving the urban population to the rural food producing areas.

That's a good way to kill millions of people. For instance the 2 million Germans who died fleeing the Red Army at the end of WW2. Everything I've seen about actual nuclear war preparation indicates that the post-war focus should be on stopping people from moving and keeping the roads clear. It's always much easier to move food to the people (where they already have shelter and other supplies) than people to the food.

Quote from: TristanH;593195Flipping through it again (haven't looked at the book in years. yay, thread!), 52% of the population died between 1997-2000 or 135.2 million (at the time).

52% fatalities is within the 30-60% range I'd expect for an all-out nuclear war and aftermath. If I was running T:2000 in the US I expect I'd keep much of the aftermath but have had a lot more nukes fired in the initial war.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;592319So, in a nutshell...Twilight:2000 is like OD&D but modern with guns and a tweaked character generation system and Outdoor Wilderness thrown in the mix, as there's very little in the way of "dungeon crawling".  It's almost exclusively a hex-crawl.

Never thought about it this way, but it's pretty close I guess!
Got some good memories about this game ("I want a G11, I *NEED* a G11!").
It's been a while since I last read the rules, so I'm not sure how clunky they are/feel nowadays. Still, we had a lot of fun with it!

Read a bit of Twilight: 2013, but the whole geopolitical make-up put me off.
I would be tempted to play T2K set in the eighties again though (still inspired by the Cold War Gone Hot supplement, for the Force on Force wargame I read a while ago).

Quote from: S'mon;593279Chernobyl caused elevated levels of radiation, but away from the reactor core there's no evidence that it actually harmed anyone, certainly not anyone hundreds of miles away. Similar with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There's no reason to think that a nuclear war would cause lethal radiation levels globally.

The yield at Nagasaki and Hiroshima are firecrackers compared to the nuclear weapons of today.  And Chernobyl wasn't even an explosion, just a high pressure release of one nuclear reactor.  That circled the Earth at least once; the concentrated blasts of hundreds of nuclear missiles will put a radioactive cloud up that will block the sun for months, possibly years; aka "nuclear winter".  The recent Fukushima disaster elevated radiation levels in the milk produced by cows, and that also wasn't an explosion.

Even a fraction of the weapons used in a nuclear exchange would all but sterilize the planet.  Which is why nuclear war wasn't as big a threat as people thought back then, and is more of a danger now with rogue powers in possession of nuclear weapons.

Quote from: S'mon;59328152% fatalities is within the 30-60% range I'd expect for an all-out nuclear war and aftermath. If I was running T:2000 in the US I expect I'd keep much of the aftermath but have had a lot more nukes fired in the initial war.

I think it would go way higher than that in the years following...

Consider the farms. If the fuel stops flowing, the farms stop producing. Absolutely no way to get even close to the same yields as in the pre-war years farming manually. Once the food runs out (1-2 years based on available reserves) real food shortages begin. The food will run out first in the larger cities that were not struck, and this will create an additional problem as the folks will move out of the cities and beginning forcibly stripping the farmland and wilderness around the cities, accelerating the food shortages.

I would guesstimate 70-80% fatalities, perhaps even up to 90+%.

Quote from: StormBringer;593394will put a radioactive cloud up that will block the sun for months, possibly years; aka "nuclear winter".

Nuclear winter was based on a mistaken computer model. The revised model showed a far less dramatic effect. Severe, with a significant impact, but not planet-killing. It was labeled "nuclear autumn".

The problem with the original model was that it treated dust particles as perfect, featureless spheres. In actuality, they're fractal structures. Being fractal, there's a lot of ridges, meaning they clump together in the atmosphere and the large clumps precipitate out faster than the perfect spheres.

Dust eliminated faster = less severe problems with reflecting sunlight = warmer temperatures, quicker.

I'm not saying that a full-scale nuclear war would be a small thing. It wouldn't. It would kill (probably) millions (or tens or hundreds of) directly, and severely disrupt climate patterns, which would have a great impact on agriculture (killing millions more).

Just pointing out that the nuclear winter model has been superseded by more accurate models. (As is not unusual in science.)

Quote from: S'mon;593279Chernobyl caused elevated levels of radiation, but away from the reactor core there's no evidence that it actually harmed anyone, certainly not anyone hundreds of miles away. Similar with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There's no reason to think that a nuclear war would cause lethal radiation levels globally.

Maybe not in terms of acute or subacute radiation poisoning, but cancer incidences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were above the national, Japanese average well into the 1980s at least, and are still on the rise in the vicinity of Chernobyl and Pripyat; especially leukemia/lymphoma and thyroid cancer, some of the most notoriously radiation-associated cancers out there. I can dig up some links if you're interested.

Of course, these are very late-onset conditions (rise in cancer rates often isn't registered until 10-20 years after exposure). But I don't even want to imagine what happens to PA survivors who develop cancer in a world without hospitals.

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;593420Nuclear winter was based on a mistaken computer model. The revised model showed a far less dramatic effect. Severe, with a significant impact, but not planet-killing. It was labeled "nuclear autumn".

The problem with the original model was that it treated dust particles as perfect, featureless spheres. In actuality, they're fractal structures. Being fractal, there's a lot of ridges, meaning they clump together in the atmosphere and the large clumps precipitate out faster than the perfect spheres.

Dust eliminated faster = less severe problems with reflecting sunlight = warmer temperatures, quicker.

I'm not saying that a full-scale nuclear war would be a small thing. It wouldn't. It would kill (probably) millions (or tens or hundreds of) directly, and severely disrupt climate patterns, which would have a great impact on agriculture (killing millions more).

Just pointing out that the nuclear winter model has been superseded by more accurate models. (As is not unusual in science.)

I'm not a physicist, nor am I a scientific ethicist but I have heard tell that Sagan et al deliberately overplayed the Nuclear Winter scenario to try and scare the hell out of anyone considering nuclear war as a viable war-fighting strategy.  Basically (so I've heard it go) the model they used was "Okay what if every nuclear weapon was used all at once on every continent evenly distributed in as close to a grid pattern as possible and still hit everything that could be called a city, and the megatonnages averaged out rather than given per-weapon oh and also a simplified weather model where the wind just blows in a big circle around the world as opposed to upper and lower air currents, the jetstream, etc."

Note: I am not advocating the notion that nuclear war would've been a-OK, and honestly any further discussion beyond the realm of the T2k game I'm really not interested.

Quote from: The Butcher;593434Maybe not in terms of acute or subacute radiation poisoning, but cancer incidences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were above the national, Japanese average well into the 1980s at least, and are still on the rise in the vicinity of Chernobyl and Pripyat; especially leukemia/lymphoma and thyroid cancer, some of the most notoriously radiation-associated cancers out there. I can dig up some links if you're interested.

Of course, these are very late-onset conditions (rise in cancer rates often isn't registered until 10-20 years after exposure). But I don't even want to imagine what happens to PA survivors who develop cancer in a world without hospitals.

Yes but Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Windscale, Chelyabinsk, and Fukashima are very different events than nuclear explosions.

To briefly take this out of the hands of discussing the real-world ramifications of nuclear war, for an upcoming T2k game I wrote up a military command trying to keep things together in Central Florida.  Note it ignores a lot of Howling Wilderness, but does take a nod to some of it.  If anyone would care to read it...

Quote from: StormBringer;593394the concentrated blasts of hundreds of nuclear missiles will put a radioactive cloud up that will block the sun for months, possibly years; aka "nuclear winter".  

It's not the radiation that blocks the sun, it's the particulates kicked up by ground burst explosions (the particulates will include some radioactive matter from the bomb but this has no effect on blocking the sun). This is the same way a meteor strike works, where it's the impact that kicks up the particles. Note that air bursts don't have this effect, and nuclear missiles are normally designed to air-burst since this increases the blast radius. Hydrogen bomb air bursts also don't cause a lot of radioactive fallout, apparently.

I'm sceptical of 'nuclear winter' predictions; the amount of gunk kicked into the atmosphere by a big volcanic eruption seems a lot more than what a nuclear war would produce, given that most explosions would be air bursts.
Volcanic eruptions do affect the weather though, and have caused significant cooling, so it's certainly theoretically possible.

Quote from: GameDaddy;593406I think it would go way higher than that in the years following...

Consider the farms. If the fuel stops flowing, the farms stop producing. Absolutely no way to get even close to the same yields as in the pre-war years farming manually. Once the food runs out (1-2 years based on available reserves) real food shortages begin. The food will run out first in the larger cities that were not struck, and this will create an additional problem as the folks will move out of the cities and beginning forcibly stripping the farmland and wilderness around the cities, accelerating the food shortages.

I would guesstimate 70-80% fatalities, perhaps even up to 90+%.

I would expect:
1) A nation under martial law, the exact opposite of the 'Mad Max' post-apocalypse anarchy. Surviving urban areas in particular would be under tight control. And people in the aftermath of disaster tend to be relatively docile and obedient to authority.
2) Severe rationing of food & fuel, both of which the US can produce a lot of, especially food. Roads are repaired.
3) People are not permitted to move around. Not much forcible stripping of farmland & wilderness occurs. As well as the military stopping it, rural areas in the US tend to have well-armed populations, much better armed than city dwellers.
4) People go hungry, some die, but most don't die.

An all out nuclear war would have been an incredible disaster, the worst catastrophe in history. It's possible that plague, cold weather, incompetence etc could cause massive postwar deaths. But 95% civilian fatalities is the kind of figure I might expect to see in areas of heavy ground fighting on the West German plain, not in the USA. The UK might lose 60-75% - much heavier bombardment into a smaller area, less food, and almost no on-shore oil production. The US and France probably more like 30-40%, with the majority being direct fatalities in urban areas.

Quote from: S'mon;593460An all out nuclear war would have been an incredible disaster, the worst catastrophe in history. It's possible that plague, cold weather, incompetence etc could cause massive postwar deaths. But 95% civilian fatalities is the kind of figure I might expect to see in areas of heavy ground fighting on the West German plain, not in the USA. The UK might lose 60-75% - much heavier bombardment into a smaller area, less food, and almost no on-shore oil production. The US and France probably more like 30-40%, with the majority being direct fatalities in urban areas.

As I recall, the timeline states that the nuclear strikes occur after a fairly intense ground war.  The casualties they cite could be in addition to those losses.  95% is still pretty damn high, though; there would only be 15mil Americans left.  So, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Quote from: The Butcher;593434Maybe not in terms of acute or subacute radiation poisoning, but cancer incidences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were above the national, Japanese average well into the 1980s at least, and are still on the rise in the vicinity of Chernobyl and Pripyat; especially leukemia/lymphoma and thyroid cancer, some of the most notoriously radiation-associated cancers out there. I can dig up some links if you're interested.

Of course, these are very late-onset conditions (rise in cancer rates often isn't registered until 10-20 years after exposure). But I don't even want to imagine what happens to PA survivors who develop cancer in a world without hospitals.

There's more. In ancient Egypt, cancer was virtually unheard of as a cause of death, that was until one of the Pharoahs in the Middle Kingdoms was diagnosed with it, and shortly thereafter died. After that, the Egyptians started keeping records on it. They recorded a very slow rise in cancer cases and attributed it to contamination in the environment, i.e. pollutants from oils, smoke, and foundries.

Worldwide, cancer rates have been historically extremely low up until the about the Christian era. Then they started rising. Part of this was due to the fact there were more scientists and doctors around objectively looking for causes of death instead of attributing it to "Evil Spirits" or "The Gods", or whatever, but part of it was an actual increase in cancer cases.

We have seen a tremendous spike in cancer cases, starting around 18th century, with more cases per capita cropping up every year. The last hundred years has been a disaster, approaching almost epidemic proportions, and the last fifty (the nuclear age) has seen an increase more than in all of pre-recorded history. Notice the newest spike in the mortality rate charts of the second reference after the dawn of the Nuclear age.

The amount of free-floating radiation in small particles is a long tail, reaching out and biting us with every airborne and surface leak, or test detonation. I think other chemicals and pollutants from the Industrialized modern era are having an increased impact as well.

Reference:

How the Ancient World Dealt with Cancer
http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2010/10/14/how-the-ancient-world-dealt-with-cancer/

Historic Growth Rates of Cancer
http://www.jonbarron.org/alternative-cancer/historic-growth-rates-of-cancer

CDC's paper on cancer from 1900 until now... You have 3x more chances of getting cancer than your Great Grandfather did. Cancer went from being 9th on the leading cause of death charts to 2nd.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/lead1900_98.pdf

Unearthing Prehistoric Tumors, Debate
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/health/28cancer.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Quote from: S'mon;593460I would expect:
1) A nation under martial law...

Wouldn't work. Especially here in America.

During WWII in the U.S. and U.K. they instituted gasoline rationing. Didn't work then either, while they were under "martial law". The poor people and dweebs were left without gasoline, and everyone else scammed the system. This also gave the dying organized crime families (In decline since the end of prohibition in 1927)  immense and broad new power, and in fact rejuvenated them, giving them new life.

It wasn't an open revolt, but the people that got to use the gasoline were the ones that ignored the rationing limits, and gas was still being shipped all over America.

In 2005, a Hurricane disabled just one of the Major refineries here in the U.S. combined with the disaster, gas prices across the country almost doubled. Overnight it seemed, certainly took less than a week.

Imagine if there was only one major refinery left. You honestly don't believe that only the military is targeted in an all-out war do you?

Quote from: GameDaddy;593510We have seen a tremendous spike in cancer cases, starting around 18th century, with more cases per capita cropping up every year. The last hundred years has been a disaster, approaching almost epidemic proportions, and the last fifty (the nuclear age) has seen an increase more than in all of pre-recorded history. Notice the newest spike in the mortality rate charts of the second reference after the dawn of the Nuclear age.

Thanks for the links!

When seeing the historical rise in cancer cases, though, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, our increased and increasing ability to diagnose cancer. Second, our increased and increasing longevity -- a classic autopsy study found asymptomatic prostate cancer in 80% of men over 90 who died of something else. But yes, it's fairly well established that at least a few elements of the modern Western lifestyle (alcohol, tobacco, diet and sedentarism) have a lot to do with the increasing prevalence of cancer.

Environmental factors are very tricky to track down and quantify, and the general popular and political concern is probably, strictly speaking, not compatible with the clinical data (or lack thereof), though usually well supported by in vitro studies.

Aaand that's enough of a threadjack for the day. :) Feel free to continue via PM, unless you feel we can steer this back into gaming territory.

Quote from: The Butcher;593545Thanks for the links!

When seeing the historical rise in cancer cases, though, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, our increased and increasing ability to diagnose cancer. Second, our increased and increasing longevity -- a classic autopsy study found asymptomatic prostate cancer in 80% of men over 90 who died of something else. But yes, it's fairly well established that at least a few elements of the modern Western lifestyle (alcohol, tobacco, diet and sedentarism) have a lot to do with the increasing prevalence of cancer.

Environmental factors are very tricky to track down and quantify, and the general popular and political concern is probably, strictly speaking, not compatible with the clinical data (or lack thereof), though usually well supported by in vitro studies.

Aaand that's enough of a threadjack for the day. :) Feel free to continue via PM, unless you feel we can steer this back into gaming territory.

I'm a bit unhappy my post got jacked by the vBulletin software. This never happens on G+ btw. Now again...

In short, life expectancy rates do account to a large degree for the low prevalence of cancer in Egyptian (42) and Roman times when the average life expectancy was about 35 years. What about earlier though, when life expectancy was much longer, spanning more than a century? Meaning really that the cancer rate has increased even more significantly in modern times when you factor all that in, and that's not reflected in any of the data I looked at.

We have better food than ever before. We also have more stuff being sold as food, that was never historically considered food.

Not all alcohol increases cancer risks. Wine in moderation, actually reduces it.

Now with the Octogenarians, Yes they live longer. Yes they have more opportunities to acquire cancer.

It's nowhere close to the increased trend of getting cancer however. Cancer in the last 60 years has doubled per capita. That means across the entire range of the population, not just the range of the population that have increased their average lifespan from 63 to 66 or so. (here in the US, That's increased to 77)... Here in the U.S. If you live to 65, you have a much improved probability of living another 18-20 years or so... Not so for the rest of the World.

So... a 77/63 increase (19%) in mortality age since 1960 and a 100% increase (since 1950 or so) in your odds of getting cancer. Yeah... What accounts for that?

Life Expectancy Data from the World Bank
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=b&strail=false&nselm=s&met_x=sp_dyn_le00_in&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&met_s=sp_pop_totl&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&dimp_c=country:region&ifdim=country&iconSize=0.5&uniSize=0.035#!ctype=b&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_x=sp_dyn_le00_in&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&met_s=sp_pop_totl&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&dimp_c=country:region&idim=country:CHN:IND:GAB:USA:JPN:RUS:AFG:ZAF:ISR:BRA&ifdim=country&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false (http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=b&strail=false&nselm=s&met_x=sp_dyn_le00_in&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&met_s=sp_pop_totl&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&dimp_c=country:region&ifdim=country&iconSize=0.5&uniSize=0.035#!ctype=b&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_x=sp_dyn_le00_in&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&met_s=sp_pop_totl&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&dimp_c=country:region&idim=country:CHN:IND:GAB:USA:JPN:RUS:AFG:ZAF:ISR:BRA&ifdim=country&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false)

 
And getting back on track, in Twilight:2000 The post apocalypse will see a much lowered life expectancy rate after wars and the radiation, and famine and all, much on par with the data I have already snapshotted for you on the just on the increases of cancer during the nuclear age, I'd expect there to be enough of a spike to include some mechanics on all the new environmental hazards that would pop up as a result, ala Gamma World.

On every level this game should appall me. However when it first came out the session I played in was one of the most engaging sessions I've ever played. Can't remember the details though, don't know if I'd feel the same now though.

Its not my style of Post-apocalypse.

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