Despite the image, I'm not talking about the GDW ruleset. I backed the kickstarter from Fria Ligan (creator of Tales from the Loop and Mutant: Year Zero, among other games), because as a child, I couldn't afford the game. Still, it fascinated me, as did all things military at that point in my life - I'm fairly certain I did a book report on Team Yankee while in middle school (the comic book miniseries is a solid retelling, if you can find all six issues). For awhile, I got my fix from the video game version of T2K, but that only worked for so long.
So when the chance to own T2K coincided with my having funds, I jumped on it.
I received the Alpha pdf before Christmas. After skim-reading it, I set it aside for other things. This weekend, the Beta pdfs arrived, so I've been reading through them in my spare time, and it comes across as somehow more grim than before.
Which is fitting, as the game itself is set in a WWIII that never was. Still, some of the packaged scenarios in the referee's book quickly begin morally grey, and then wallow in it. Particularly the adventure set around a former military academy run and protected by students-turned-child-soldiers.
Soviet spies posing as Americans (or Americans serving as Soviet spies) is a recurring theme in the game which resonates with me, because last year I learned that one of my fellow platoon leaders from long ago was convicted of being a Soviet spy.
There are rules for creating your own homebase, which reminds me a bit of the Fallout video games, as the PCs scrounge for parts, alongside scrounging up food, clean water, miscellaneous other supplies, and ammo. Ammo is always in demand, because despite T2K being more of an RPG about tired soldiers trying to get back to the states (itself in a bit of a post-apocalyptic mess, just without zombies), combat is a very real possibility, and combat with modern-ish fireamrs relies on having enough ammo.
Because for many people in-game, the war is still going on, at least to a degree. Local militias, Russian troops, and marauders from both sides will gladly engage any Allied (mostly American) troops they encounter, if only to kill/enslave them and take their stuff.
Grim or not, T2K is a role-playing game, which means PCs of some sort are needed. Players take on the roles of survivors of the disaster in Kalisz and WWIII in general. The rules provide two options for creating PCs: archetypes and lifepaths. The former are pregenerated PCs and the latter the means for creating your own PCs from scratch. Both options require PCs to have a specified moral code, big dream, and a buddy (chosen from among the other PCs). These three traits ideally help drive the role-playing side of the game.
The truth is that I have no idea who among the gamers I know might be interested in playing T2K. I know I can draft my eldest to play through the combat-related rules, but for actually playing through several sessions, I haven't a clue.
Even if I never get to play it properly, I can still mine it for my fiction writing, which tends towards the post-apocalyptic.
If nothing else, the box set will look cool upon my shelf.
Art from one of the rulebooks; presumably by Niklas Brandt, Gustaf Ekelund, or Jarek Kubicki
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