Twilight: 2000 4th edition offers two ways to create your characters: Archetype and Life Path.
Using the Archetype, you choose from the nine archetypes provided in the Player’s Manual the one that you feel closest to the character you have in mind, follow a few simple rules to customize it and make it more unique, and you are basically done. The archetypes provided cover a variety of roles like civilian, grunt, medic, officer, spook and offers a quick way to flesh out a character and have it ready to fight in the World War 3 that never was.
The Life Path system lets you build up your character in different steps starting from age 18 and increasing his age and skill levels at every step, while picking up specialties along the way. With every step there’s an increasing chance that your character will be drafted and his war will start, along with an increasing probability of him having to lower one of his/her attributes on account of aging. This is – in my opinion – a fantastic way not only to build your alter-ego for the campaign, but a great way of tracing his/her story as well, ending up with a character that carries not just stats on a sheet of paper, but a great story.
For the campaign I have created four different characters using the Life Path system.
I won’t detail their personal history here, as I plan on dedicate each of them a single post as the campaign progresses, but I will briefly introduce them as well as how they crossed paths.
Leonard ‘LED’ O’Donnell is a 41 years old American from Needham, in the greater Boston area. At the onset of the war, he was working as an analyst for the European desk of the CIA and saw his priorities quickly shift from potential threats to ongoing. He was assigned the task of maintaining contact with assets in the former Warsaw Pact countries and moved to central Europe as one of the links between the chaotic front line and Langley. Rather than gathering strictly combat valuable intelligence, he was tasked to look past the movements of armies and keep an eye on ‘the plot within the plot’.
As the war progressed, he operated from various undisclosed locations in Belgium, the Netherlands and southern Germany. As frontline intelligence personnel suffered attrition at a rate only slightly lower than the regular army units, and as general operational conditions degraded further and further, he was moved closer to the front. Communications up and down the chain of command grew sporadic and that translated into broader autonomy.
Eventually, in the spring of 2000 his superiors reached him with an assignment: recover a Polish asset carrying what was presumed to be valuable intel from an area North of Łόdź. Unfortunately, nobody bothered to tell him about the imminent attack NATO forces had planned to launch in the same region.
He reached the 5th Mechanized Division with the authority of commandeering a full squad; the division commander Major General Bonagurio begrudgingly assigned him a full squad, or at least what was left of it.
Nathaniel ‘NASCAR’ Roma is a 34 years old American from Bryan, eastern Texas who ended up in the army as a way to have his sentence reduced after being arrested and convicted for attempting to sabotage a racing car in a NASCAR race in Florida. Having found a new family in the army, he decided to stick with it longer than he had to and eventually was sent to Europe and saw combat in northern Germany and later Poland.
He eventually earned a promotion to corporal and, in the fall of 1999, he met DOC who was assigned to his squad, which back then was already under 50% of its organic. Later combat actions, infections and diseases dropped the total strength of the squad to just NASCAR and DOC right before the planned 2000 spring offensive in central Poland.
That’s when their immediate superior told them they had been assigned to a First Lieutenant O’Donnell for an unspecified mission.
Donna ‘DOC’ Douglas is a 32 years old American woman from Vermont. She became a doctor like her parents as an emergency physician, and when the war broke out in Europe, she had just started a 10 months period working in understaffed clinics across the rural part of the US. According to her, being hard to reach is why they couldn’t draft her in the early years of war.
Eventually lack of medical personnel forced the armed forces to draft civilian doctors and DOC was sent to Landstuhl military hospital in Germany, near the US Ramstein base. She was then moved to smaller, frequently improvised facilities scattered around western Germany and when the capacity of the military of maintaining large medical facility was compromised, she was assigned to the 5th Mechanized division in the fall of 1999 and met PFC NASCAR.
In the spring of 2000, she and NASCAR were assigned to First Lieutenant O’Donnell.
Aleksander ‘ALEX’ Krasinski is a 36 years old Pole from the eastern part of the country. He was pushed into joining the Polish Urząd Ochrony Państwa (Office of State Protection) after the fall of the Berlin wall at a time when the country was still struggling to find real independence from Russian interference.
When Russian troops entered Poland, he was trying to help in anticipating enemy movements and coordinating counterattacks. After major setbacks, the Office of State Protection instructed him to remain behind enemy lines, help guerrilla movements against the invaders and provided him with channels through which he could report any useful intel to NATO allies, specifically British intelligence.
In the spring of 2000, through a combination of luck and skill, he acquired precious intel that he tried to pass to his contact on NATO’s side, but was apprehended by Russian GRU operatives. When cornered, he did however manage to send a brief distress signal warning his capture was imminent.
As the story progresses, I’ll fill in the blanks and expand on the personal history of each character.