93 Games Studio is pleased to announce we have acquired the license to produce the official Twilight 2000 Version 3.0. We are excited about this project and look forward to expanding this prolific franchise in the coming years.

The new edition of Twilight will use our present timeline of events and the current state of world affairs as the precursors to a devastating and chaotic WWIII. It will use an improved game system with plans to include modernized and streamlined features from older versions. Development is already underway and plans are for a 2007 release. We are also planning several fan features, such as a developer's blog and a chance to become one of several signature characters of the game.

UPDATE: We are releasing our first installment of a series of background fiction pieces for T2K13. I am not going to ruin it for you, you'll have to read/listen for yourself.

SHALL NOT PERISH at 93 Games Studio
Download other Twilight: 2013 material here

Twilight: 2013 is a roleplaying game of post-apocalyptic survival and renewal.

Twilight: 2013 is...

We start with the title. Obviously, we're making a successor to the venerable Twilight: 2000, and the year implies a timeline update.

For some parties, there'll be an inevitable association with the Mayan calendar, but this is purely coincidental. Really. Give us flying saucer influenced Yucatan mushroom fueled prognostications of apocalypse and I'll eat your freakin' skull.

But... "twilight." The first hit on Dictionary.com gives us this:

"the soft, diffused light from the sky when the sun is below the horizon, either from daybreak to sunrise or, more commonly, from sunset to nightfall."

That's important. Note that twilight can be both the beginning or the end of a day, although common usage focuses more on the latter. That's good for our purposes. The common view is that a global nuclear war will lead to the inevitable collapse of all human civilization - Einstein's fourth world war quote. At the end of the Last Year, humanity is poised on the edge of a long, bloody slide into a second Dark Age. The beginning of night. Twilight is here.

But... how far gone are we? Is recovery possible? Are the pieces intact enough for us to pick them up again? Yes, things are going to get worse than they already are, but is it possible that the fall will be halted before it drags us so far down that we'll have to rediscover hundreds of years of progress?

Twilight can imply a coming new day, too. Don't neglect that.

You can't have Hell without hope.

... a roleplaying game...

Roleplaying. For us and our fellow gamers, it's the act of escaping our everyday lives through a shared experience of interactive storytelling, using characters of our own design - our spiritual and intellectual offspring - as the heroes of the piece. It's self-generated vicarious adventuring.

Characters. Characters are important. Publishers achieve acclaim for systems and settings, gamemasters receive reputations for their plots, but players remember their characters. They remember what they were able to do, albeit at one remove. They remember heroism and treachery and pain and loss and triumph and moments in the spotlight and things that would look so damned good on screen.

We are making a world in which all of those things can occur. We are shaping a place and a time that darkly reflect our own daily surroundings, but in which a small group of people with the will and the capability can Make a Difference. We game because we want that sensation, which the constraints of modern society deny most of us.

Character first. Numbers a distant second.

If a heroine dies in the forest and no one sees her fall, does her sacrifice matter?

Yes. If the world is worth saving. This is what we need.

... of post-apocalyptic...

Apocalypse. Ignoring the Judeo-Christian writings and associated meanings, the secularized definition is one involving widespread or universal disaster or destruction.

Well, that's what we're bringing about here.

We are bad people. We are the worst mass murderers in future history. By our keystrokes, we will enact the death of between 75% and 90% of the total human population of the planet. The blood of over five billion of our fellow men is on our hands. Cities will burn at our whim. The great works on which we so blindly depend for our daily comforts will be shattered by our own words.

Fun, isn't it?

The trick here is to titrate the destruction so it isn't total. No one wants to play "Rat and Roach War" or wield a length of +2 rusty rebar with a block of concrete on the end. The popularity of Twilight: 2000 was, in large part, due to the fact that the familiar world was blown up just enough to be rugged and depopulated, but yet was still enough intact that it wasn't impossible for the survivors to attain a level of existence with frontier comforts.

As White Wolf has pointed out on occasion (to no effect), real people encountering monsters won't jump about and shout four-color platitudes. They'll shit themselves. However, shitting yourself isn't very fun, which is why we don't see WWGS publishing Monster Hunter: The Pants-Shitting.

A similar principle applies here. Yes, every character has seen (and almost certainly done) horrible things over the past year. It's going to leave a permanent impression on their souls. But we don't need to linger on it to the point of turning off the reader. That's an important distinction. Just as we vicariously enjoy the cool stuff our characters do, we always have the option to snap filters into place to keep from experiencing the downside of their ordeals.

... survival...

In early 21st-century America, virtually everyone has access to the basic necessities of survival. For those who can't provide those for themselves, extensive charitable organizations exist to ensure that they receive at least the bottom tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

In 2013, there are no charities left. There are no vast surpluses of goods and money and time and energy and help on which the needy can draw. Individuals can depend only on what they can do personally. If they can't provide for themselves, they die. In small groups, some specialization - exchanges of services - emerges. Larger communities have already figured out some sort of semi-efficient division of labor or they've collapsed under the weight of their individual members' combined needs (or are about to).

We take a lot of basic services for granted - "we," in this case, being the affluent consumers who can afford to participate in this hobby. Characters in this game won't be able to take anything for granted. A not-insignificant chunk of the rules material is going to address the tasks that characters have to perform to keep themselves fed, housed, clothed, medicated, and protected.

What does this mean for the setting material? It means we need a world from which a sufficiently capable character can extract the necessities of survival, and maybe a few luxuries. Sufficient resources - natural or remnants of man's - have to be available, and in sufficient quantities to last long enough to give us a fighting chance at rebuilding. We aren't writing Caveman: 2015 here.

Should it be easy? Heck, no. Make 'em work for it.

... and renewal.

This last part is the unexpected one.

Yes, the world is hurt. Bad. But is it terminal? Are we ready to turn out the lights, close the door, and leave it to the rats and roaches? No.

I repeat: you can't have hell without hope.

In this case, the hope is that the characters can salvage something from the ruins - not just to sustain themselves, but to start rebuilding. The war was last year, not a decade or a generation ago. They aren't sitting around the campfires telling their children of metal boxes that once moved on wheels and glass spheres that lit the night without burning. They remember the glory and the power of civilization in all its finery, and while there may be a few barbarians who like things as they are, most of the survivors are going to want to recapture as much of what they've lost as they can.

I say, let them try. Give them the tools and stand back and see what they can do. Do not assume that the only option is simple subsistence followed by surrender to the night.