Civilian Guns

In the encounter rules for the original Twilight series, parties equipped with "Civilian"-class guns were assumed to be a smattering of handguns and hunting rifles and shotguns.

This might be appropriate for rural Poland in the Twilight era, after 30-40 years of Soviet oppression - but in the United States during either the Cold War or the modern universe, that's hopelessly off base.

Even in the original Twilight era, when the notion of civilian gun rights was at a historic legal and social low, guns of all classes were much more common in America. And in the 2.5 decades since I first wrote this guide, the needle has slammed sharply in the direction of gun rights.

I've chosen to try to express this with a "civilian firearms" table as a supplement to the Version 2.2 encounter tables. A simple 1D10 roll, with modifications, will yield the percentage of the encountered party armed with various classes of firearms. The classes include:

• Military guns - whether legally owned (legal collectors, law enforcement) or not (criminals, looters, marauders). These would mostly be rifles, although with referee's discretion machine guns and mortars would become possible with larger encounters.

• Modern Sporting Rifles - depending on the part of the world, in descending order of prevalence - an AR15, AK47 or other pattern of semi-automatic version of a military rifle.

• Hunting Rifles - could also include military rifles from before 1950, including semi-automatics like the M1 Garand and M1 Carbine, as well as foreign surplus military firearms (especially British, German, Russian and Italian WW2 examples)

• Shotguns - sporting and, more rarely, self-defense shotguns.

• Handguns - revolvers and automatics (with more automatics later). Note that any percentages over 100% will involve NPCs with long arms also having handguns.

Note that these rules can apply to any other part of the world - although the specific weapons encountered should be tailored to local

Modifiers (on 1D10)

These modifiers are cumulative.

• For example, a group of marauders on Long Island ("Blue" America) in a post-apocalyptic scenario would net out to -3.

A die roll of 5 would thus be modified to a "2".

Modifiers

• Rural / "Red" US: -1

• Urban / "Blue" US - +1 (+2 in jurisdictions like New York City and Washington DC).

• Cold War Universe: +2

• Twilight / postapocalyptic scenario: -3

• "Anarchy" Scenario: -1

• Peacetime: 0

• Encounter near a military unit / base: -1

• Party is "organized" - either as militia or as marauder band: -1

• Western Europe (with exceptions noted below): +3

  • Switzerland, Israel: -2

  • Finland: 0

  • Austria: +1

  • Estonia, Czech Republic: +2

• Repressive society (USSR, China, most Asian countries): +5