# Twilight 2000 *Created:* 2023-08-10, *Modified:* 2026-11-10 ![[Twilight 2000 (cover).png]] **Twilight 2000** is the war that never ended. World War III broke out in 1997 and simply kept going — no victory, no armistice, just wrecked armies, broken supply lines and civilians trying to live through the aftermath. The 4th edition from Free League rebuilds the classic survival game on the Year Zero engine and drops the players into Poland or Sweden with a rifle, a squad and not much else. ## Setting The game begins in the closing years of the **Twilight War**, a conventional and nuclear conflict that ground Europe down without producing a winner. The core box offers two campaign regions: - **Poland** — the main battleground, now a landscape of feudal warlords, lawlessness and ruined cities, with NATO and Soviet remnants scattered across it. - **Sweden** — officially neutral, invaded anyway, with a government enclave holding part of Stockholm while Soviet troops occupy the rest. The player characters are **survivors**: soldiers, civilians, medics, mechanics, stragglers. They are not superhuman; the game's tone is grit, scarcity and the slow work of keeping a small group alive and maybe, eventually, finding a way to fix something. ## Mechanics ### Step dice and the Year Zero engine Characters have four attributes — **Strength, Agility, Intelligence, Empathy** — rated **A–D**, which map to die sizes: **D12, D10, D8, D6**. Skills are rated the same way. To act, roll your attribute die and your skill die together and count a **success** on any die showing **6 or higher**; a single die showing **10 or higher** (only possible on a D10 or D12) is a **multiple success**. ### Pushing and ammo You can **push** a roll — reroll the dice and take the new result — at the cost of accumulating stress or damage. **Ammo dice** are extra D6s rolled with autofire; each 1 wears down your supply, so shooting a lot is a resource decision as much as a tactical one. ### Combat and travel Combat is tactical and map-based: **battle maps** use hexes and cardboard tokens, and initiative is drawn from a deck of playing cards. Travel runs on a separate **travel map** with 10-kilometre hexes, where the party chooses a route and the Referee draws encounters; the Referee's Manual carries the encounter and travel procedures. ## Editions - **Twilight: 2000** (Game Designers' Workshop, 1984) — the original, by Frank Chadwick. Not held. - **Twilight: 2000** (GDW, 1990) — the second edition. Not held. - **Twilight: 2000 v2.2** (GDW, 1993) — the revised second edition. Not held. - **Twilight: 2000** (Free League Publishing, 2021) — the fourth edition, rebuilt on the Year Zero engine. *Held* as the **Player's Manual** and **Referee's Manual**, with the *Urban Operations*, *Hostile Waters* and *The Black Madonna* supplements. ## References - [Twilight: 2000 — Free League Publishing](https://freeleaguepublishing.com/en/games/twilight-2000/) — the publisher's page for the current edition. - [Twilight: 2000 4th Edition — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/366014/Twilight-2000-4th-Edition) — the PDF listing. - [Twilight: 2000 — RPGGeek](https://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/48146/twilight-2000) — the edition history. - [Twilight: 2000 4th Edition — The Gaming Gang review](https://thegaminggang.com/game-reviews/twilight-2000-4th-edition-rpg-review/) - [Twilight: 2000 (Free League) — First Look & Overview — Hexed And Countered](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNec1l68A-g) — a walk through the 4th-edition box.