Review: Twilight 2000: Survivors' Guide to the United Kingdom

[Roger Bell_West's autoposter]

This 1990 RPG supplement by Peter Phillipps portrays a Britain after
World War III. Well. Up to a point. It is a famously bad book.

This is also the last item released for the first edition of
_Twilight: 2000_ (T2K hereafter). Don't read too much into that date,
though; while the second edition did indeed take into account the
breakup of the USSR, its basic model was still "massive nuclear and
conventional war in 2000", just with slightly different ways of
getting there. I mean, that's the _point_ of the game.

And talking of getting there, a useful starting point is a page on
ways of tying the UK into an existing T2K campaign (which, by default,
begins with a random collection of US troops marooned in Poland and
trying to get back to the USA): if they missed the boat in _Going
Home_, or got stranded in _Boomer_, there are hooks to get them ashore
in the UK. There are even rules for boating across the North Sea.

Then we get the history section. The UK continues as a US ally, fair
enough; Phillipps has the sense not to make any political party
blatant good guys or bad guys. Things escalate in Germany and British
troops are moved there. (The Gurkhas get bounced around a lot, because
let's face it Gurkhas are cool.) It's all obviously set up with an end
state in mind, but it's not wildly implausible.

Until we get to open warfare between protestants and Catholics [_sic_
for the upper and lower case] in Northern Ireland. Well, the Army's
largely been pulled out, and I suppose the useful idiots who supported
the gang bosses might have been calling on them to do some actual
liberating rather than just talking about it. The Catholics get
control of Fermanagh and Armagh and call for military aid from the
Republic to help them hold it.

Which they get.

Then things start to get a bit more plausible again as the nukes start
dropping. At least one person whom I expect to read this will be happy
to know that Bury is explicitly noted as a target. Aldershot takes a
hit, but these strikes are aimed at population centres rather than
military targets (and the only strike bigger than a dot on the map is
London). RAF Brize Norton, Coningsby, Leuchars, Waddington, Boulmer?
Not mentioned. Lakenheath, Mildenhall, Fairford, Menwith Hill?
Untouched. Nothing on Salisbury Plain, no barracks, no admin outside
London and Bristol. Gloucester takes a hit, but not Cheltenham.
"Glasgow" takes a hit, which I suppose we can consider to include
Faslane… Bedford is a target? York? Dundee (but not Inverness)? This
starts to make the Baedeker Blitz look well-planned.

[](uk_target_map.jpg)

(It's not clear what's happened to the Thames or why there's that
great lake upstream from London. It appears on some but not all of the
other maps.)

Central control collapses, and local alliances start to form. The SNP
declares Scottish independence with no apparent objections, and
establishes its own army (how, with pretty much all British troops
already fighting overseas?). Wales welcomes refugees but puts up a
defensive line anyway. The Ulster Defence Regiment (what's left of it)
pushes back the Irish Army, inconclusively…

Gradually British forces get pulled back to the UK, but somehow they
are unable to deal with roving bands of marauders. I'll come back to
that.

All right, this is a book from 1990; back then you needed to talk
about the actual physical geography and stuff because apparently
gamers (expected in the introduction to go out and buy maps) didn't
have access to reference books. Indeed, a couple of pages are given
over to a past-tense narration of what the pre-war British economy was
like that feels cribbed from an encyclopedia. The war has killed over
60% of the population either directly or indirectly, and the ports and
airports are gone.

Maps actually aren't too bad… by the standards of the day. All right,
there's the usual American error of "Thames River", but there's at
least some idea of what's where, and which bits are wooded or hilly.
I'm comparing with _Torg_ here.

Life is refugee camps for "many" people, usually working on rebuilding
houses that they then get to live in, or hand-to-mouth but with your
own house. Anyone who wants one can get a boring full-time job in
farming or light industry. The exchange rate (well, theoretical
exchange rate; goods in the other books are priced in dollars so we
need a conversion factor even if nobody's actually changing money) is
£1 = $5, which in the real world didn't survive the Second World War;
no reason is given for this restoration.

Offshore oil rigs are an obvious scenario seed, but because they're
such tempting targets they're apparently made to look abandoned (no
lights at night, no going outside during the day, resupply boats
disguised as fishing craft, etc.). Apparently the author never
realised just how _noisy_ an operating rig is.

"Anglia" is apparently the bit of England between London and the
Midlands. Cornwall has grown a Wicked Duke (actually [far too
plausible](https://westcountrybylines.co.uk/qanon-in-cornwall/)),
except for St Austell which is run by a group of Soviet PoWs who
escaped from confinment when their guards ran off. This is all clearly
focused on having adventures rather than on being a realistic
portrayal, so I'll give it some leeway here.

NPC writeups include the Prime Minister, the head of MI5, the American
ambassador (more or less), and various more covert figures including
several Soviets. As usual there are no stats, just summaries of their
histories and personalities, but this does a decent job of providing
adventure hooks.

(An illustration shows a sign with "Ironbridge" to the left and
"King's Lynn" to the right.)

Organisations are rather odder. We have the government, MI5 and MI6,
fair enough. The DIA in this setting has got a big boost from the US
split between civilian and military governments, but the book's
careful to say that it doesn't do much in the UK, so why do we care?
The American Legion, even though most of the US service personnel in
the UK have now gone back to the US…? Oooo-kay.

And of course we get the marauder groups, some of which explicitly
started as football hooligan gangs, and are generally self-taught
perhaps with a leavening of ex-military people. The biggest ones are
about 1,300 strong. And the British Army, weakened as it is, is unable
to prevent these people from taking control of towns? (OK, there are
bandit gangs in _Reign of Steel_'s Zone London… but there isn't any
significant British Army in that setting, just local police officers
and the relatively tiny SAS.) Oh, and there's a pretender to the
throne with his own army, because of course there is – but to be fair,
he's described mostly as a figure of fun (with guns), not someone
who's taken seriously. (Phillipps also avoids the usual American
cliché of having the royal family taking an active part in the
political life of the country.)

Then we get into the actual crunchy game stuff: random encounter
tables, always a big part of T2K. A note suggests that bringing back
rabies is too cruel, though cholera and bubonic plague are just fine –
though that's the only mention of them here. They are statted in the
core rulebook, of course.

We get character generation notes for British characters. (Apparently
anyone can join the Gurkhas if they're tough enough.) It's pretty
basic, but original T2K only had the first iteration of the
career-based character generation that GDW would later use in later
editions of T2K and its other mid-1990s games.

Lots of guns and vehicles! (I'd never heard the "Endeavour" and
"Engager" names given here for the L85 ("SA80") and L86, but
apparently [they're real
things](https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1989-04-04/debates/3ff185b5-bf9a-45d0-ad97-886b46a4ea16/Guns).)
This is clearly what the author cared about, and the descriptions and
numbers mostly look at least plausible.

We also get an Order of Battle, and notes on current deployments (and
who's converting to horse cavalry, though not where they're getting
the battle-trained horses from). Apparently the SAS has been stood
down, even though an NPC's missing son is noted as having been on duty
with them. The Gurkhas are stuck in Kowloon, which is no fun.

But then again, I think that unlike many military RPGs the fantasy in
T2K wasn't of being an élite special forces dude but rather of being
just another grunt – thrown on your own resources with a few of your
mates, without the support structure that makes a real-life army more
than a band of warriors – and prevailing even so because every grunt
is special. In the default campaign start of Poland, your army has
been wiped out and you get to be a hero; but here your army still
exists, it's just a bit rubbish.

And that's it. There are some adventure seeds scattered through the
various descriptions, but mostly you're expected to use this as a pure
sourcebook; there's no actual adventure included here. There are lots
of unstable situations ripe to be mucked about with by player
characters, which is great; it's just a shame that the basic substrate
will strike any actual British person as fundamentally unreasonable.

Of course, for the primarily American audience of the game (country
size alone would suggest that the majority of players would be
American and the subject matter may have made it more so) that may not
have been a problem. Like _Blackout/All Clear_, this is a holiday in
the Britainland theme park rather than an attempt to give British
readers something they'd recognise, and that may indeed have been a
better fit for T2K players of the day.

This appears to have been Phillipps' only RPG publication.

https://blog.firedrake.org/archive/2020/11/Twilight_2000__Survivors__Guide_to_the_United_Kingdom.html