The large size of the book was a plus, as I wasn’t looking forward to requiring several supplements to make a complete game. Online support is progressive, my only complaint is none of the art was spectacular. To be fair, it sets a darker mood which fits with modern times, and T2K art work never was gonna fit in with a new game.

A reviewer can’t review a game save as how it’s presented. As what it is. If I took, say, D&D and played it under my own house rules, ignoring things and making other stuff up, then reviewed what I played, rather than what the actual game IS, that would be useless as a review.

In criticising the intuitiveness of the system I’m not saying it should be more like d20 or whatever, just that it wasn’t intuitive. It felt clumsy and without justification to be so.

Given that a ‘counterstrike’ was, essentially, solicited on the company boards, yes, a lot of the initial review critique was fanwank.

The design of the backround story is simply that it must touch on all the bases but without overloading on details. I hate to break it all to you, but the product is written by an essentially American team (with some international help) for an American audience – so naturally its going to be americancentric. And comments about the writers not having an appreciation for geopolitics are unhelpful to say the least – keep in mind this is a ROLE PLAYING GAME – ITS MAKE BELIEVE – the setting doesn’t have to be absolutely plausible, it doesn’t even have to be a little bit plausible – if there are parts you don’t like, change it! Discard it! I’m working on the draft of a campaign at the moment where the situation in Britain is a little more murky – taking some inspiration from Shadowrun’s UK sourcebook and Oliver Cromwell himself: the campaign will be centured around a low-key three-way civil war between the absolute monarchists (King Alexander or whoever I decide on); the Parliamentarians and the loyalist monarchists (who happened to have an amnesic Prince Harry freshly rescued from Lithuania in their possession). Wow, I changed stuff to suit my desired game…that was hard wasn’t it?

As for typo errors? Please, give me a break. In an age when this: wat u doin hv a gud dy lol, passes for English (and not just when sending a text message via mobile phone), the odd confusion over rein/reign isn’t worth the time it takes to type/write a criticism about it.

But I haven’t yet played the game using the default setting – the game I’m currently GMing is using the mechanics but is set in the Aliens ‘verse (a la Ellen Ripley). The game mechanics provide a simple, yet comprehensive combat system that when used correctly are very brutal.

I disagree with the reveiwers comments that somehow the game mechanics are counter-intuitive. You have a number of dice, you have a target number, you have modifiers to that target number, you roll your dice aiming to get a number equal to or less than said target number. Criticism of this seems to stem from people who have become brainwashed (thanks a million WOTC/Hasbro) with the concept that bigger is better…”I swing my Flaming Sword of Godly Damage +7 with a +32 morale bonus and +16 circumstance bonus and a +8 munchkin bonus…and I..miss, aw man…what? He’s got an AC of 98…oh well, a few more buff spells/potions/epic magic items and I’ll be sure to hit him and knock him back two squares…”

At the expense of straying into “forum-fanboy smackdown” territory, the system works for me, I (like most people I should imagine) have things that I like and things that I don’t. I think the vehicle rules need more work – but I ain’t gonna bag the system just because of that.

However, in closing I do agree with the various comments about the artwork. I loved Tim Bradshaw’s work in the 2nd Edition of T2K and was very disappointed with what was provided in the newest edition. A picture is worth a thousand words afterall and the art doesn’t do it for me. But since I don’t spend my days looking longingly through my core rulebook, pawing the artwork and wailing “woe is me” it’s not that much of a big deal.

At first I thought the rules to be a bit unnecessarily complex, but after playing it I agree with a few here and say that the system works. Actually it works pretty well actually and I have to say I’m impressed with how smoothly things play out and the level of ‘realism’ the rules portray. It adds to the play instead of just bogging things down. Which is an issue I’ve had with similar attempts.

Over all I would say it’s worth getting whether you’ve played the GDW versions or not and I look forward to more from Studio 93 in the future.

I also know that the back cover of the book says the world population was reduced to 10% of original, however the internal text led me to believe that it was far higher than that, especially since the were surviving populations pretty much everywhere except Taiwan. The Southern Hemisphere seemed to be largely untouched with the exception of their conventional war.

For their to be only 10% left China and India would pretty much had to be completely wiped out, but weren’t, and no other country was wiped out, only a few key cities.

China sounds like it should have been wiped out, since the USS Kentucky completely unloaded on it, however it still reads like it has a population surviving.

So the cover may say 10%, maybe it says 10% somewhere inside the book, however when I read it I felt that far more than 10% survived. I was thinking 60% of the world population was still alive and kicking. Probably more.

As for the rules, I read them, but haven’t played them. All I can say is they sound good, and I too am a veteran of many different RPG’s over 24+ years. I hope to get a game together soon, after I get the print book.

I do know I feel excited about this game, more excited than I can say about a number of other RPG’s I ended up liking and disliking.

I do think people should actually play with the rules before criticizing them. I recently thought the Aces and Eights RPG would be slow and clunky when I read them, but it isn’t. Its been fast and exciting. It helps that you don’t know what the final outcome is until the damage is referenced on the right section of the charts. So your adrenaline and excitement keeps going until then.

This isn’t the first time I found such a thing out, which is why I don’t give much weight to any reviewer who hasn’t actually spent a few hours putting the mechanics themselves through their paces.

Plus I have found the editing far from problematic, and in my opinion is greatly over stated in your review.

Plus it should also be noted that an updated/corrected PDF was sent out to us buyers a few days ago. It isn’t the one I have been reading, though.

So I for one like the idea of playing this game, with a setting based on “what ifs” based on our current world events rather than ancient cold war scenarios that cannot happen anymore anyways. I have also taken a liking to the “return to the old frontier” way of life possible in so many areas of the current setting. I look forward to running a game where my players do their best to restore their “home” to whatever condition they can manage.

But as too the rules etc I was over-joyed. They are alot easier to use than old TW2000 2.2 rules.

Everything needed is in 1 book which is always helpful as well.

Overall out of 10 I would happily give it a 8.5 (would have been 9 save the new background).

I don’t agree.
China is larger than the United States with more regions yet rates about half a page in total, Australia is about the same size as the United States and rates about half a page.

Honestly, as someone with a degree in English and a professional writer myself, I didn’t notice an overly glaring amount of typos. They were there, and the book probably needed a pass or two through a good editor, but nowhere on a level that I would have even mentioned them in a review.

However, the nitpicking on the background story seems a bit pointless. The GM is the master of the world, and a few words on the page are but the set-up. A city, town or encampment will always be as big or as small as the GM requires for any given scenario. So even if the book says the world is down to 10% of its former population, your town still has just as many people as the GM needs it to. The time line has its odd points, but then again, how many people laughed at the absurd notion that the Mexicans could invade Southern California in the original Twilight 2000 time line?

The bottom line is, a GM will use what he needs, and ignore what he does not. The 93 Games team has given the players and GM enough of a skeleton to create a reasonably plausible world. Really, any story for a modern apocalypse is going to be somewhat unbelievable, because we have to accept that the world will go completely insane and destroy itself within a short time. As it stands, there is a wealth of material for players to start pretty much anywhere in the world, with characters of any nationality. Of course it will be a little Americanocentric. It’s a game by an American team. But, it has to be remembered, the United States is a big place, and has a big role in the world community. The United States is about the same size as Europe, so if it takes four pages to describe all of its different regions, that is to be expected. Europe takes up almost five pages, roughly nine if you count Russia and its states in Eastern Europe.

As far as the disease factor goes, it seems that the reviews understanding of health science is somewhat limited. Certainly far too limited to be making scientific judgments on its accuracy. The flu may not be a killer on its own, however, in the absence of antibiotics and proper rest and nutrition, a severe influenza virus can weaken the immune system making those who aren’t killed by the virus itself much more susceptible to death by other means. And the book takes this into account.

However, it’s also irrelevant. Like I said before, the game world is exactly how the GM needs it to be. The world of Twilight 2013 has been intentionally left vague. There are no exhaustive lists of what units survived and how many tanks they have and where they are. The designers left these details to the GM. Your Twilight 2013 experience is exactly what you want it to be.

Since that review though, I have found that I am now quite neutral towards 2013, I don’t love it and I don’t hate it. I’m not likely to use the game background as it stands and I don’t know if I’m ever likely to use the rules but they certainly aren’t bad and certainly nowhere near approaching c**p – that description belongs to that pile of stinking offal that Ha$bro/WOTC have foisted onto the RPing public recently (yes I am passionately opposed to the notion of removing most of the RP elements from the game that started most of us on the RPing path. I’ve played enough RPGs and enough MMOs to find out that I HATE an RPG trying to use MMO mentality for its game mechanics.).

I am still somewhat amazed at the extreme views being shown by both sides towards 2013.
No matter what people think, the developers should be congratulated for getting a rules system onto the marketplace that is fully workable and provides a more realworld level of gameplay that many former (like me) and currently serving military (and police) personnel like to see in RPGs.

It is an oh so welcome alternative to the level up system of the D20 OGL that I personally like for fantasy but have no desire to use for ANY modern/near future/sci-fi game setting. The Reflex rules are actually pretty good, I don’t particularly like certain aspects of them, such as the use of extra D20s for higher skilled PCs to check for success but that certainly does not mean the system is bad, my view is simply personal preference.
However I would like to know since when has it ever been a necessity for a reviewer of any game product to playtest the rules before being allowed to comment on them? The general RPG community hasn’t demanded that sort of thing from reviewers in the past to any great extent when it came to accepting a game review so why is it ‘required’ now?

I cannot agree though, with the comments about 2013 being too big, Twilight: 2000 Version 2.2 is 280 pages and if you add on the extras for the alternate universe book of Merc: 2000 it runs to 399 pages. Personally, I don’t see any problem with that. What I do have a problem with is that the PDF was originally listed by certain distributors for US$40, I’d happily pay US$40-60 for a print copy of a game but I’m not prepared to pay that much for a PDF that I will have to spend some serious money on if I want to get it printed and bound. To be fair, that isn’t specifically the fault of 93 Games Studios but it sure as hell stopped me getting the game until the price was dropped.

I do agree that the world being reduced to 10% of it’s population is overkill. It doesn’t really need to be cut down so far. On a purely mechanical level, where the hell are you going to get enough civvies/goodguys/badguys for the PCs to deal with if there’s only 10% of the population left? That’s starting to get a little too desolate and harsh for most of the players I game with.

I disagree with Mr Desborough’s assessment of the game being less Americano-centric. 4 or so pages of background for the USA compared to half a page or just a few paragraphs for any other country shows a bit of Americano-centric bias.
I also disagree with the notion expressed by one of the designers on the 93 Games forum, that the old guard of Twilight players weren’t supporting 2013 because they were old time wargamers who preferred combat rules over role playing rules. Most of the ‘old guard’ appear to be very much, long time role players.

However, my biggest problem with this product is very much a personal idiosyncracy, the rules are quite fine, the gameworld history is good enough even with it’s less than desirable quality of research, I love post-apocalyptic games and own quite a few (so I have indeed seen some of the rules/rules concepts that Mr Desborough alludes to but for those younger players who have never heard of Aftermath, let alone played it, the recycling of rules ideas is still a good idea) and I do see this as being a good addition to the genre. Thank you 93 Games for making a PA game that does NOT have mutants in it! (Yes I am thoroughly sick to death of the garbage idea that if it’s post-apoc, it must have mutants)

However, I can’t bring myself to think of it as Twilight because for me Twilight was always about the Cold War going Hot, to steal a term from another game, Twilight’s mythos was about two large societies with very differing philosophies finally coming to blows and the players eking out their survival/rebuilding society in the aftermath of the Cold War going nuclear. This game could have been called anything else and it would have still done well, but to call it Twilight saddles it with a whole lot of expectations from those of us who carry that Cold War baggage.

I’ll let Keith speak to the issues that fall within his domain, but I do have a question for James. In your opinion, which specific parts of the book could we have dropped to bring it down 50-100 pages without losing viability as a stand-alone rules set? As I noted in our forums, I’m a bit croggled at this observation. Every other size complaint we’ve received stems from the lack of content in certain areas important to the complainants – be it vehicles, firearms, or detailed orders of battle for the Twilight War combatants. I will admit that we had no small problem with feature creep during the writing process, but I think a lot of it was necessary to retain the same level of function present in the second edition.

How about a little more maturity here?

Discuss the review, discuss the game. I’ve had enough of the insults already.

If you dont like it, don’t play it.