T MINUS THREE, WHO’S IN ON MARCH MADNESS, & TWILIGHT 20XX

WHO’S IN ON MARCH MADNESS

“There is no such thing as bad publicity.” – Brendan Behan

It looks like word is getting around about March Madness. Talyman notes that it has exceeded the D&D challenge in dullness of questions, and that the cool kids do not do blog hops anyway. I never considered myself cool, ditto this blog, which besides being uncool by nature, has been described as mixing “fantastic content with headache-inducing graphics in a way rarely seen in this day and age.” LOVE IT! That was precisely the vibe I was going for, so I am glad someone is paying attention.

Talyman’s comments have also inspired me to make a list of blogs which have expressed interest in participating in the challenge:

Mesmerized by Sirens

Barking Alien

The Savage Afterworld

What A Horrible Night To Have A Curse

The Other Side

The RPG Corner 

Crit This 

Timnits & Trolls (who has gone ahead and finished the challenge already! BRAVO!) 

Tower of the Archmage 

Swords & Dorkery

d20 Dark Ages

Semi-retired Gamer 

Wine & Savages

If you plan on participating and want me to add you to the list, drop me a line.

TWILIGHT 20XX REBOOT SEED

I’ve always had a soft spot for the game Twilight 2000, not for the somewhat clunky mechanics, but instead for the tight adventures and attractive portrayal of a non-fantastic apocalypse. No zombies or rifts, just things falling apart and lonely soldiers trying to get back home.

But the game had one major flaw – it was dated incredibly quickly, both in terms of geopolitics and technological advance. When it came out way back in 1984, no one could have predicted that its US-USSR nuclear exchange scenario would become moot with the dissolution of the Soviet empire a scant 5 years later. Similarly, the splatbooks of the latest military gear look antique in a world where DARPA is rolling out power armor, drones make daily strikes in the heart of Pakistan, and both the NSA and Snowden showed us how laughble the ideas of privacy and security are in the age of Wikileaks.

In this light, I've whipped up a little transmission that would set the scene of a reboot of the game, Twilight 20XX, in a projection of our own dystopic world. A projection that (hopefully) will turn out to be as laughable as the original premise of Twilight 2000.

Enjoy.

United Nations Secure Transmission

Helmund province, Afghanistan

<<Begin Transmission:

We’re the last ones here at base, and we’re bugging out. I’m not giving details, as all communications have been compromised. Another group tried to get through by way of our ‘allies’ in Pakistan. They took the best APCs and gear here and went last week.

Word is they never made it across the border. So we are gone.

Our orders are to stay put, but that is a death sentence. We’ve got a few locals on our side, thankful for some of the infrastructure and education we provided. They’ve given us supplies and, more importantly, hope of a way out. We’ve got some local translators who want to come, and some stragglers from the UN office and independent contractors.

When the House of Saud went down, the world as we knew it ended. We’ve waited long enough for evac, and it’s not coming. We figure that although everyone has oil reserves, the way the climate has gone out of whack they need it to survive the winters. Most of us are North American, and we figure Alaska and northern Canada are OK with woodstoves and an endless supply of wood. That is our objective.

In some ways, this place is better than it was, in some ways worse. The locals burnt their opium fields to grow food, but the Taliban muletrain hasn’t been affected. It just switched from hauling arms and opium to potatoes and child brides. People either are too busy surviving to care about us or want our heads on a pike. Time to go.

We’ve all seen the news about how the Muslim Brotherhood swept into the power vacuum created by the Arab Spring and turned off the oil. They’ve restored the Caliphate, just as Hitch always knew they wanted to, and plunged us all back into the Dark Ages. To tell the truth, I think a lot of the hillpeople here won’t know the difference.

So we’re out. The goal is to get to some US bases in Asia - that is if China doesn’t roll over them with her oil reserves in the next few weeks.

Wish us luck, and hope to see you back home.

<<Transmission End