“I wonder sometimes if I’m talking to ghosts or if maybe I’m the ghost”
excerpt from the Urban Operations expansion book
In 2023 Free League introduced two modules (expansions) for Twilight 2000, the first of which was URBAN OPERATIONS, loosely based on The Free City of Krakow module for the first edition of TWTK. This is a substantial addon to the core game, and it comes (in its physical form) in its own boxed set. Here’s a brief overview of its content:
- The Urban Operations book (96 pages) with new rules about playing in cities (economics, trading, resources, law & order, politics and more) and city warfare, 2 new archetypes for creating your characters, rules for travelling city-wide (sort of a half-in-between movement on a combat map and a travel map), urban encounters, factions, plots and scenarios.
- New battle maps for urban environments and close quarters engagements
- New tokens to populate your battle maps with debris, sandbags, blocked/breached doors and to indicate on what floor a pc/npc is.
- City travel maps for Krakow (Poland) and Karlsborg (Sweden), plus battle maps for Wawel Castle (Krakow) and Karlsborg Fortress (Karlsborg). The two cities are also detailed in the expansion book, with an appendix dedicated to each.
- 16 new encounter cards focused on urban encounters, that you can swap with the equivalent cards of the core set deck. These have a nice feature: they are marked on their edge as pertaining to The Black Madonna module; this way you can easily take them out of the deck when you deem them not appropriate to the current phase of your campaign.
Also, everything mentioned above is sent to you in digital form when you buy the physical set.
The following is an excerpt from the module’s book itself:
Warfare in urban environments is hell, even compared to combat in the open field. Distances are short and contact with the enemy is often brief and brutal. The benefits of superior technology and firepower are reduced, in favor of knowing the battlefield and using every inch of it to your advantage.
If you’re running or participating in a TW2K campaign, odds are (but you may call it a certainty) that eventually your group will approach a town. It could be a small village, a newly established settling, a larger town or even a city with its variety of people, factions, opportunities, troubles and dangers.
This is where Urban Operations comes into play: offering you the specific tools to navigate a city (or post-WW3 equivalent) from the subtle art of diplomacy, to the less talkative yet louder ability to win a firefight in (very) close quarters. Add the new scenarios, new archetypes, plots and encounters and the milage you can get out of this expansion grows even more significantly.
For my own game, this module lands a big hand both in the world building / storytelling part, and gameplay-wise. Any veteran player of the first edition of Twilight: 2000 knows that Krakow is a mandatory stop for any group travelling South, and it remains true in this module. Also, there’s a couple scenarios I think are very fitting for my campaign.
There are new rules for city warfare and city travel: I like my grid-less approach to close quarters battles, but I’m definitely going to incorporate a lot of the new rules in future urban battles. As for city travel: so far my group has only been in two (mostly) friendly town; should the group enter a more fractioned environment, the new rules are going to come in handy.
So, from now onward, the Urban Operations expansion is officially part of my campaign. You can purchase the Urban Operations boxed set on Free League’s online shop here.
Twilight: 2000 4th Edition and all Free League’s products con be found here.
