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When You Say, “Thermonuclear War,” I Think You Mean “the Call to Adventure”! The Twilight: 2000 Tabletop Role-Playing Game and the Postapocalyptic World’s Imaginary Spaces
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2025
Abstract
Historians of the Cold War and the nuclear age have largely overlooked the existence of tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs), while films, comics, novels, and television programmes that tackled the challenging imaginary, yet all-too-possible, wastes of a post-nuclear landscape have been abundantly analysed. As cultural products and tools through which to imagine other worlds, TTRPGs offer powerful insights into how, where, and why certain groups thought about the spectre of the nuclear age and how they dealt with this threat by gaming within make-believe postapocalyptic worlds. This article draws together several threads in its analysis of the American-designed and -produced Twilight: 2000 TTRPG’s historical significance. Through analysing Twilight: 2000 as a case study of how a TTRPG functions as a specific nuclear-cultural object in its own right, the article also locates this game as a part of a wider-reaching dystopian fantasy rooted in the massive everyday reality of atomic annihilation. Likewise, the game, its mechanics, setting, and artwork are analysed here as part of a distinctive Cold War culture that permitted participants to derive pleasure and affirmation from fictional “adventures” in the postapocalyptic environment.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with British Association for American Studies.
References
1 Frank Chadwick, David Nilsen, Lester W. Smith, and Loren K. Wiseman, “Referee’s Manual,” Twilight: 2000, 1st edn (Normal, IL: Game Designers’ Workshop [GDW], 1984), 23–27. Various sources use “roleplaying,” “role-playing,” and “role playing.” For consistency, role-playing will be used through this text, unless in quotations or product titles.
2 The literature on the nuclear age’s imaginative cultural and social history is vast. Classic works include Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Allan M. Winkler, Life under a Cloud: American Anxiety about the Atom (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and others. See also Thomas Bishop, Every Home a Fortress: Cold War Fatherhood and the Family Fallout Shelter (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020); H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Margot A. Henriksen, Dr Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Jonathan Hogg, British Nuclear Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defence and American Cold War Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); David Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999); and so on.
3 Even wide-ranging cultural studies examining films, novels, radio, and computer games such as Robert Yeates’s American Cities in Post-apocalyptic Science Fiction (London: UCL Press, 2021) do not mention TTRPGs.
4 “Game master” (and D&D’s “dungeon master”) is an obviously gendered term used within a male-dominated hobby. T: 2000 used the neutral “referee,” a term located in the wargames and military simulations that formed the designers’ backgrounds.
5 I am indebted to Jon Hodgson for the discussions and invaluable insights that laid the foundation for this element of the analysis.
6 Sarah Lynne Bowman, William J. White, and Evan Torner, “The Increasing Specificity and Maturity of Role-Playing Game Studies,” International Journal of Role-Playing, 15 (2024), 1–8, 2.
7 See, for a representative sample from the International Journal of Role-Playing, Maryanne Cullinan, “Surveying the Perspectives of Middle and High School Educators Who Use Role-Playing Games as Pedagogy,” International Journal of Role-Playing, 15 (2024), 127–41; Orla Walsh and Conor Linehan, “Roll for Insight: Understanding How the Experience of Playing Dungeons & Dragons Impacts the Mental Health of an Average Player,” International Journal of Role-Playing, 15 (2024), 36–60; Josephine Baird, “Role-Playing the Self: Trans Self-Expression, Exploration, and Embodiment in Live Action Role-Playing Games,” International Journal of Roleplaying, 11 (2021), 94–113; David Jara, “A Closer Look at the (Rule-) Books: Framings and Paratexts in Tabletop Role-Playing Games,” International Journal of Role-Playing, 4 (2013), 39–54.
8 Sarah Lynne Bowman, The Functions of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems and Explore Identity (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2010); Evan Torner and William J. White (eds.), Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Participatory Media and Role-Playing (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2012).
9 William J. White, Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001–2012: Designs & Discussions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,2020).
10 Jon Peterson, The Elusive Shift: How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022); Peterson, Game Wizards: (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021); Peterson, Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventures from Chess to Roleplaying Games (San Diego, CA: Unreason Press, 2012).
11 Aaron Trammell, The Privilege of Play: A History of Hobby Games, Race, and Geek Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2023).
12 Aaron Trammell, “Misogyny and the Female Body in Dungeons and Dragons,” Analog Game Studies, 1 (July 2016), 23–33; Trammell, “How Dungeons and Dragons Appropriated the Orient,” Analog Game Studies, 3 (Feb. 2019), 121–39.
13 Aaron Trammell, “From Where Do Dungeons Come?”, Analog Game Studies, 1 (July 2016), 67–74.
14 Lawrence Schick, Heroic Worlds: A History and Guide to Role-Playing Games (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991).
15 James M. Ward and Gary Jaquet, Gamma World: Science Fantasy Roleplaying Game (Lake Geneva, WI: TSR, 1978). Further editions appeared in 1983, 1986, 1992, 2000, 2003, and 2003. Greg Costikyan, Dan Gelber, Eric Goldberg, and Allen Varney, Paranoia: A Role-Playing Game of a Darkly Humorous Future (New York: West End Games, 1984). Further editions appeared in 1987, 1995, 2004, 2009, and 2017. Games Workshop licensed the game for European distribution and published the first European edition in 1986.
16 Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994), 4, 233–58. See also Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion, 2000), 222–61.
17 Kevin Schut, “Desktop Conquistadors: Negotiating American Manhood in the Digital Fantasy Role-Playing Game,” in J. Patrick Williams, Sean Q. Hendricks, and W. Keith Winkler, eds., Gaming as Culture: Essays on Reality, Identity, and Experience in Fantasy Games (Jefferson, NC: McFarland., 2006), 107. This is not to say that female-identifying gamers did not participate in TTRPGs such as T: 2000. However, they were in a minority both specifically and – as indicated – in the hobby as a whole.
18 Statistical reporting on the hobby’s demographics in the 1970s and 1980s is almost nonexistent, and any assessment of the community’s gender makeup is perforce anecdotal. However, Wizards of the Coast (then publishers of D&D) conducted a survey in 1998–99, finding that 81% of respondents identified as male. See Ryan S. Dancey, “Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0,” at www.rpg.net/news+reviews/wotcdemo.html (accessed 14 Nov. 2023).
19 Steven L. Dashiell, “Hooligans at the Table: The Concept of Male Preserves in Tabletop Role-Playing Games,” International Journal of Role-playing, 10 (2020), 26–39, 27.
20 Paul Boyer, “Nuclear Themes in American Culture, 1945 to the Present,” in Matthew Grant and Benjamin Zieman (eds.), Understanding the Imaginary War: Culture, Thought, and Nuclear Conflict, 1945–90 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 81.
21 Hogg, British Nuclear Culture, 133–34.
22 See Lawrence S. Wittner, The Struggle against the Bomb, Volume III, Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Andrew S. Tompkins, Better Active than Radioactive: Anti-nuclear protest in 1970s France and West Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
23 See, for example, Stephen J. Cimbala, “Year of Maximum Danger? The 1983 ‘War Scare’ and US–Soviet Deterrence”, Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 13, 2 (2000), 1–24; Jonathan M. DiCicco, “Fear, Loathing, and Cracks in Reagan’s Mirror Images: Able Archer 83 and an American First Step toward Rapprochement in the Cold War,” Foreign Policy Analysis, 7, 3 (July 2011), 253–74; Nate Jones, ed., Able Archer 83: The Secret History of the NATO Exercise That Almost Triggered Nuclear War (New York: The New Press, 2016); Arnav Manchanda, “When Truth Is Stranger than Fiction: The Able Archer Incident,” Cold War History, 9, 1 (2009), 111–33; Len Scott, “Intelligence and the Risk of Nuclear War: Able Archer-83 Revisited,” Intelligence and National Security, 26, 6 (2011), 759–77.
24 Peterson, Playing at the World, 376–82.
25 Patrick Crogan, Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
26 On Missile Command’s genesis and development see John Wills, Gamer Nation: Video Games & American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 87–95.
27 Matthew Grant and Benjamin Zieman, “Introduction: The Cold War as an Imaginary War,” in Grant and Zieman, 9.
28 On civil defence as “theatre of security” see Tracy C. Davis, Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007).
29 Fabienne Collignon, Rocket States: Atomic Weaponry and the Cultural Imagination (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 7.
30 Eva Horn, “The Apocalyptic Fiction: Shaping the Future of the Cold War,” in Grant and Zieman, 33.
31 Duncan Bell, Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 18.
32 Hogg, British Nuclear Culture, 8.
33 GDW should not be confused with the similarly named but separate British games company Games Workshop, known for the Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40,000 tabletop miniatures wargames. The title of this section is taken from Chadwick et al., Twilight: 2000, 1st edn, box art tagline.
34 Frank Chadwick, Daryl Hany, John Harshman, and Loren Wiseman, En Garde! (Normal, IL: GDW, 1975); Marc W. Miller, Traveller: Science-Fiction Adventure in the Far Future (Normal, IL: GDW, 1977). Traveller – in various versions – has remained in almost constant publication since it appeared in 1977.
35 Shannon Appelcline, Designers & Dragons: A History of the Roleplaying Game Industry, Volume I, 1970–79 (Silver Spring, MD: Evil Hat Productions, 2013), 167.
36 Ibid., 167.
37 Eric Goldberg, Commando (New York: Simulations Publications, Inc., 1979). Commando was a wargame with TTRPG elements rather than a wholehearted TTRPG. Paul D. Baader, Lawrence Sangee, and Walter Mark, Merc (Jericho, NY: Fantasy Games Unlimited, 1981); William H. Keith Jr., Jordan Weisman, Ross Babcock, Eric Turn, and Steve Turn, Behind Enemy Lines (Chicago, IL: FASA Corporation, 1982); Joe F. Martin, Recon: The Role-Playing Game of the Vietnam War (n.l.: Role-Playing Games Inc., 1982). In its first edition, Recon was much closer to a wargame than an RPG. From its 1983 second edition onwards it pivoted towards role-playing.
38 Author unknown, Player’s Guide to Twilight: 2000, at www.farfuture.net/Guide%20to%20Twilight%20v1.pdf (accessed 17 Aug. 2023), 5; Rick Swan, The Complete Guide to Role-Playing Games (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990), 231; Schick, Heroic Worlds, 257.
39 Gamma World was narrowly preceded by the obscure The Realm of Yolmi by West Coast Games. More concerned with puns, in-jokes, and lampooning D&D, the apocalypse stemmed from an outer-space gas that devastated Earth and mutated the remaining life forms.
40 Aspects of Gamma World bear a strong resemblance to Spinrad’s The Iron Dream, although without Spinrad’s darkly satirical pastiche of Nazi race fantasies.
41 Kevin Dockery, Robert Sadler, and Richard Tucholka, The Morrow Project (Warren, MI: Timeline Ltd, 1980). Further editions appeared in 1983 and 2013.
42 Robert N. Charette and Paul Hume, Aftermath! (Jericho, NY: Fantasy Games Unlimited, 1981).
43 Andy Slack, “Review: Aftermath!”, White Dwarf, 34 (Oct. 1982), 16–17.
44 Appelcline, 238.
45 Lawrence L. Bond, Harpoon (St. Paul, MN: Adventure Games Incorporated, 1980). Tom Clancy – the 1980s and 1990s most popular exponent of this literary form – was a close friend and collaborator of Harpoon’s designer Larry Bond, a former US Navy officer and defence analyst, who worked with GDW when they bought the rights to Harpoon in 1987. Whether contemporary accounts are to be believed, T: 2000 was an influence on Clancy’s blockbuster 1986 novel Red Storm Rising. If nothing else, the similarities between T: 2000’s future history and the novel are close and obvious.
46 John Hackett and others, The Third World War, August 1985: A Future History (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1978). The book was revised in 1982 as The Third World War: The Untold Story to incorporate real-world developments.
47 Chadwick et al., “Referee’s Manual,” Twilight: 2000, 1st edn, 25–26.
48 Loren Wiseman, Howling Wilderness (Normal, IL: GDW, 1988), 7.
49 Chadwick et al., “Play Manual,” Twilight: 2000, 1st edn, 3.
50 Chadwick et al., “Referee’s Manual,” Twilight: 2000, 1st edn, 28–30.
51 See, for example, William H. Keith Jr’s early T: 2000 supplements Free City of Krakow (Normal, IL: GDW, 1985), which offered a gazeteer-esque appreciation of Poland’s second city, and Pirates of the Vistula (Normal, IL: GDW, 1985), which detailed the world along the river Vistula’s banks; Frank Frey’s supplement The Black Madonna (Normal, IL: GDW, 1985), which detailed Silesia; and William H. Keith Jr. and Timothy B. Brown’s supplement The Ruins of Warsaw (Normal, IL: GDW, 1985), which detailed the ruined Polish capital.
52 Individual groups could – and did – locate their games almost anywhere. Poland and Germany were frequent choices.
53 Frey, 3; Keith, The Free City of Krakow, 3; Keith, Pirates of the Vistula, 3; Keith and Brown, 3.
54 Carol Cohn, “War, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War,” in Miriam G. Cooke and Angela Woollacott, eds., Gendering War Talk (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 231–32.
55 Ibid., 232.
56 Maps and mapping were central components of TTRPGs from their earliest days. From maps of dungeons to be explored, to charts depicting star-spanning empires, cartography and play went hand in hand.
57 Timothy Barney, Mapping the Cold War: Cartography and the Framing of America’s International Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 9.
58 Wiseman, Howling Wilderness, 8.
59 Confusingly, there were two Steve Jacksons active in the games community at the time. One was the owner of Texas-based Steve Jackson Games, founded in 1980 and initially known for wargames such as OGRE and the Mad Max influenced Car Wars. The other, British, Steve Jackson was co-founder of Games Workshop and – with Ian Livingstone – co-creator of the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, published by Penguin. To add to the confusion, the American Steve Jackson was hired to write three books in the original Fighting Fantasy series.
60 Rick Swan, “Review: Twilight: 2000,” Space Gamer, 74 (May–June 1985), 9.
61 Greg Porter, “Review: Twilight: 2000,” Space Gamer, 74 (May–June 1985), 9.
62 Jim Bambra, “Review: Twilight: 2000,” Dragon, 152 (Dec. 1989), 34.
63 Chris Felton, “Review: Twilight: 2000,” Imagine, 27 (June 1985), 42.
64 Marcus Rowland, “Review: Twilight: 2000,” White Dwarf, 68 (Aug. 1985), 14.
65 Ibid. However, the oral history of post-apocalyptic RPGs I am compiling indicates that some gamers did see rebuilding and restarting as elements of the game experience, generally beyond the frameworks offered by the game’s supplements.
66 I am grateful to Morgan Davie for this insight regarding mechanics in 1970s and 1980s TTRPGs.
67 Sarah Albom, “The Killing Roll: The Prevalence of Violence in Dungeons & Dragons,” International Journal of Role-Playing, 11 (2021), 6–24.
68 A completely “average” character would be able to take a close range “average” shot (30 “hits” of damage) in the chest (30 “hits” capacity) from a high-powered rifle and have it count as a “slight” injury (less than or equal to the body area’s hit capacity) and thus have no effect on combat performance. Non-player characters were significantly weaker in terms of hit capacity and were thus killed or otherwise eliminated more easily.
69 Barry Atkins, More than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 88.
70 An exception is Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu (CoC) TTRPG, based on the works of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. CoC was one of the few TTRPGs in the period that attempted to model mental damage. CoC gifted characters with a “sanity” score affected by encounters with unspeakable horrors, reading blasphemous tomes, or being party to particularly upsetting situations. This score took the notion of physical “hit points” and translated it to the mind in an unsophisticated way. Like physical damage, points were added/removed until a change of state (to “insanity” as opposed to death/injury for physical damage). “Sanity” (which CoC retains up to the current seventh edition) was a crude and often reductive attempt to model psychology which represented mental health in often unfortunate and unsympathetic ways.
71 More recent TTRPGs have grappled in a variety of ways with the psychology of characters and the ways in which the situations they find themselves in impact their mental health and well-being.
72 John R. Emery, “Moral Choices without Moral Language: 1950’s Political–Military Wargaming at the RAND Corporation,” Texas National Security Review, 4, 4 (Fall 2021), 11–31.
73 Chadwick et al., box, rear cover, Twilight: 2000, 1st edn.
74 Nicholas Meyer (dir.), The Day After (ABC TV, 1983); David Brin, The Postman (New York: Bantam Books, 1985).
75 Chadwick et al., “Players Manual,” Twilight: 2000, 1st edn.
76 Loren Wiseman, Frank Chadwick, John P. Brown, and Paul R. Banner, Going Home (Normal, IL: GDW, 1986).
77 William H. Keith, Red Star, Lone Star (Normal, IL: GDW, 1986).
78 Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 105.
79 William H. Keith Jr. and Loren K. Wiseman, Airlords of the Ozarks (Normal, IL: GDW, 1987); Thomas Mulkey and Loren Wiseman, Urban Guerrilla (Normal, IL: GDW, 1987); Timothy B. Brown and Loren Wiseman, Kidnapped (Normal, IL: GDW, 1988).
80 Frank Chadwick, Twilight: 2000, 2nd edn (Normal, IL: GDW), 6–15.
81 Clayton Oliver, Simon Pratt, and Keith Taylor, Twilight: 2013 (Raceland, KY: 93 Game Studio, 2008).
82 Tomas Härenstam and Chris Lites, Twilight: 2000: Roleplaying in the World War III That Never Was (Stockholm: Fria Ligan, 2020).
83 Fria Ligan, Kickstarter campaign for Twilight: 2000 – Roleplaying in the World War III That Never Was, at www.kickstarter.com/projects/1192053011/twilight-2000-roleplaying-in-the-wwiii-that-never-was (accessed 4 Oct. 2023).
84 At the time of writing this oral-history project is underway. Respondents from the USA and UK who played post-apocalyptic TTRPGs in the 1970s and 1980s are being interviewed to help understand how games such as T: 2000 were received, interpreted, and played. This oral history will be the backbone of a longer-form analysis of post-apocalyptic TTRPGs.