Submissions are Closed, and the Voting is Upon US!

Well, everyone! Our call for submissions has ended, and we have five submissions for people to judge and vote on. Please come on down to the Facebook page, and vote. You have until midnight on December 30th to cast your vote.

Just to give you all an idea of what we got for submissions this year, I have decided to post one picture from each entry.

So come on down and vote, our submitting artists would appreciate it after the hard work they have put in.

Villages, Part 2

I want to thank Phil Hatfield for pointing out some things I had neglected when I had written the original article about villages. His points were excellent and as such, inspired this sequel.

A Glimpse of A Town

As stated in my previous article, villages are like road stops on the post-apocalyptic road trip that Twilight: 2000 often is. And every village has a certain look, in fact, a village can have many kinds of looks depending on who's running the place, as well as the materials and skill base available, this is especially true when it comes to the defenses of the village, which is the thing that interests most miniature wargamers the most.

As stated in my article on buildings, the look of Twilight: 2000 buildings are a mix of pre-war buildings held together with contemporary materials (and most of them not having been cleaned recently), or post-apocalyptic shanty towns and tent cities to accommodate the hordes of refugees that have shown up to seek any sort of "lifeboat in a storm."

The village defenses will range from amateurish to deadly professional and will be as much a mix of materials as one can find. Everything from scavenged explosives, punji pits, cheaveu-de-frix, abatis, to simple walls made up of earth, rubble or both can and will be seen as part of a village's defenses. Entering a town is an experience in Twilight: 2000, as many towns have become wary of well-armed strangers. Most of the time, any strangers will be asked to disarm before they are allowed entry and the doors into a village wall are usually some of the best guarded and fortified in town.

All roads into town will be blocked by whatever is handy, from 18-wheelers, to (if you want to borrow a neat idea from the movie Stake Land), functioning railroad locomotives. The interior of town will be shabby and crowded, with trash pickup a memory, though how shabby will depend on how serious the town is to avoiding disease and vermin infestation.

Any and all gas stations or stores that sold propane are long since empty, probably with boarded-up windows, their snack bars long since looted. The town might be using the place for the municipal still(s) now, but there are other places they might be using as well.

Other than the outer walls, the town hall and the police stations are both heavily guarded, if your nation had permissive gun laws before the war, the sporting goods and gun stores have either been likewise looted, or the guns and ammunition seized to help form the local militia.

Any grocery stores likewise either stand empty, or are now the town municipal larder, and are as well guarded as the town hall or the police station, though this will depend upon the construction of the store in question.

Most villages in Twilight : 2000 do not have any sort of real electrical power. The ones that are often generated either by water, wind, or a surviving nuclear power plant. In any of these cases, the village will take great pains to disguise the fact that it does, in fact, have electricity. Nothing will attract marauders to a town like unshielded light in the distance.

Every square inch of land, including former parks, play fields, and playgrounds will be cultivated to grow food, and most farm animals will be breeding stock. Meat will be somewhat rare in the average villager's diet unless they go hunt for it.

Any roads in town will be in poor repair, and nobody should be using any road bonuses on a table.

Scenario Ideas

• A typical Marauder attack on a fortified town, numbers and defenses should be carefully balanced to make for a challenging game, but keep in mind that both sides are fighting for their lives. The villagers cannot afford to give up the amount of food the marauders want, and the marauders need the village's larder to get through the winter to come. A neat twist is to have a small band of infiltrators loyal to the marauders available to sabotage the town's defenses.

• A riot breaks out in a town occupied by government forces when the government brings in refugees and forcibly resettles them in the confines of the town. The militia, of course, sides with the village. The refugees should be a large number, but unarmed for the most part, while there should only be a small, but well-armed force of government troops.

• A small force of villagers have hired some American mercenaries to help them retake their town (or what's left of it) from a band of marauders. The marauders have left little standing and few survivors, but the villagers won't know that till they get into town. After that, they might not bother with a thing called prisoners...

Blog News...and a bit about villages...

Ok, first, the blog/personal news. Even with the weather, the convention season marches on. And so do I. I have managed to finagle a day trip on Saturday to Cold Wars. I try to make the various HMGS cons as often as I can (have a long, and happy history with them), but yeah, with the upcoming nuptials? That probably will be my only con this year, though who knows?

But I am excited to potentially see fans and other curious readers (I suspect the latter outnumbers the former), I'll be the fella in the black shirt with the first ed Twilight: 2000 cover on the front!

Yeah, I will stand out..but that's the point, no?

Anyhow, enough about me and my travels!

A Few Notes About Villages

Villages are the usual touchstones of every Twilight: 2000 adventure. They're the road stops on the post-apocalyptic road picture Twilight:2000 can become. And the problems are many, some of the more memorable include the little village of Ostrow, who was occupied (very) unwillingly by the Soviets in Escape from Kalisz, to Dobrizieden, who had an American unit in residence (with a somewhat unstable and certainly haunted commander), in Black Madonna.

Not all problems are gameable on the tabletop, but many can be, given an imaginative and resourceful referee.

Take Dobriziden. At first glance, this would seem like a hard thing to base a miniatures game around, right? Wrong. Dobriziden has some fairly interesting neighbors. To the north, there is the remains of the 129th Motor Rifle Division, which according to Black Madonna, is holding together under Colonel Kasnov's middle of the road leadership till he can march the division home in the spring (the adventure taking place in the Fall of 2000). The division is teetering on the edge of joining the 9th and 38th Tank Divisions in flying apart and becoming bandits scattered all across Eastern Poland.

To the south? There is the Markgraf of Silesia. The Markgraf is by no means your stereotypical fascist maniac, but he is someone who can at best, be charitably described as a warlord. Now, that said, like many of the more "benevolent" war lords to be found in the world of Twilight: 2000, he usually asks "please" before he annexes you, and would rather you join willingly, pay his taxes and in return, he brings law, order, and peace. He is also very involved in the running of his kingdom, and is not above replacing a bad subordinate or two, probably violently. In short, he is about as good as you can expect under the circumstances.

This does put Dobriziden in a bit of a fix. The people are very attached to B Troop for the things they have done to protect the town. In the adventure White Eagle, we have a throw away bit where Dobriziden joins the Margraveate, and Molly's position as mayor is pretty much confirmed, but I never thought much of that resolution.

A better resolution? Or perhaps a more challenging one? Captain Warren gets word that Operation Omega is happening and the USAEUR is going home. She cannot in good conscience leave the town of Dobriziden undefended, and yet, she knows some of her troopers are going to want to go home, probably enough of them to matter. As much as Dobriziden has become a second home, it's not Idaho, where most of the 116th ACR hails from, so, Warren hatches an almost insane plan. She decides to try and march the people of Dobriziden to the Warta, where an enterprising tugboat captain has promised to sail the lot of them to Bremerhaven, and home.

The tabletop opportunities there are rife, think Battlestar Galactica, minus the space elements, instead of a "rag-tag fleet searching for Earth", it's a "rag-tag column headed for the Warta." Marauder ambushes, set piece raids on Soviet positions, or perhaps a Margavate roadblock trying to convince the column to turn around and go home, there's plenty of possibilities. 

And that's just one village folks...and there's a lot of villages in Twilight: 2000.