There are two types of military gamers--those who have military experience, and those who don't. Games like Twilight and Merc 2000 have to compromise--they must provide enough detail about both the character and the equipment he carries to interest the veteran without intimidating the military neophyte.
GDW's various Weapons and vehicle guides give a wealth of detail to the hardware end of things.
This site addresses the other side of the man-weapon equation. It provides many new, more detailed character classes, reflecting the wide diversity of jobs in both military and civilian life.
Perhaps most importantly, it gives you details on what the jobs are and how they're done. This will give the military novice an idea of what to do, and the more militarily experienced player a place to start in developing a fully detailed character that can be played with the knowledge of how a character of that type would really act.
Let's face it--most people come to a game like Twilight after playing games like D&D (TM) or Star Trek. How many of them know what "Fire and Movement" is? Probably not many. But when a Twilight player finds himself in an ambush, he can't throw a fireball at his foe, and he can't call Scotty to beam him up. He needs more information--for instance, how would a REAL infantryman get out of a jam like this?
In the meantime, the player who KNOWS such things wants enough detail to keep him interested. Where do you go?
I hope this website helps.
I first discovered Twilight 2000 in 1986 - and it quickly became my favorite role-playing game. I ran campaigns pretty consistently from 1987 until 1994, when family and kids got in the way for a couple of decades.
In 1992, I published an article in Game Designers Workshop's old Challenge magazine on a more coherent and realistic system for generating Special Forces characters - making them more realistic as well as accounting for many different nations' different approaches to special operations forces.
After Challenge published the article, I thought - "why not expand the concept to cover regular military, reservists, other branches of service, and more, better civilian careers?" With that in mind, I expanded the "Special Forces" article into an entire character generation book...
...just in time for GDW to go out of business.
And so, not long after the World Wide Web went, well, worldwide, and with nothing to really lose, I converted the "book" to a rudimentary website, and posted it online - and pretty much forgot about it. Family and kids.
And then, a few years later - probably around 2005 - while doing some desultory Googling to find out what'd happened to my old RPG hobby, I found that my little ol' character generation site had become the de facto character generation site for a fair chunk of the Twilight-playing community worldwide.
Of course, by this time I'd long since left the ISP where the old site had been hosted, and the source files had disappeared many hard drives hence. The site continued on for years - technically, as a "ghost" site, just extra electronic clutter on a server somewhere in Minneapolis.
It was fun while it lasted.
But along about 2010, when the ISP very belatedly decided to clean up their servers, the old site disappeared without much of a trace, and there wasn't much I could do about it.
So - content over twenty years old, that hasn't been touched in 17 years.
But in meeting the people who still play Twilight via various RPG social media communities, I've been gratified by the number of people who'd told me they missed the old Character site, even a decade or two after using it.
And so I decided to try rebuilding it.
The content for the original site was written in the late '80s and early '90s - when the Cold War may have been over, but it was still "the last war" everyone had in mind. It's interesting (to me) to note the last update to the original site was six months before 9/11 - and that changed the world in ways some readers may be too young to grasp.
So the challenge will be, over time, to:
It should be interesting!
Expect this site to be a "Work in Progress" for quite some time.
As with the original site, everything on this site will be written to Version 2.2. Nothing against other versions, but I can only do so much work for free...