Playing at the End of the World

An interview with historian and game designer Malcolm Craig about post-apocalyptic tabletop role playing games in the Cold War

Doominations is a series of interviews with people whose life experiences or work in some way touches on the questions of interest to the post-apocalypse.

Dr. Malcolm Craig is a Senior Lecturer in American history and self-identified role-playing game designer at Liverpool John Moores University. His current research, which he is turning into a book, is on tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs), particularly ones that take place in a post-apocalyptic or post-nuclear setting, and their relationship with the nuclear age. As someone who is also interested in post-apocalyptic role playing games on computers, but has very little first-hand knowledge about TTRPGs other than having read Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World (highly recommended), I thought it would be pretty interesting to chat with Malcolm about his research. I would note, for the benefit of the reader, that Malcolm is Scottish and has a Scottish accent. This is an excerpt from a longer interview, and has at times been mildly edited for clarity.

What was it that brought you to approach TTRPGs as a subject for academic study?

So I started on this by accident. I’ve played roleplaying games since I was a teenager, and that’s quite a long time ago now. But for my doctoral studies, I did a lot of work in traditional diplomatic history of nuclear proliferation. And during the COVID year, so about 2022, I kind of had a moment of clarity and decided I didn’t enjoy my research anymore, but I didn’t have a future research direction.

I was actually literally down in our basement where our boxes of old games are, and I found my old copy of Twilight: 2000, this post-apocalyptic role playing game from 1984, and I went, hmm. Loads of people have done stuff about kind of nuclear issues in books, films, television, video games, all that kind of thing. But participatory table-top role playing games haven’t really been covered. So I wonder if I can maybe do a wee project in this.

And it just kind of snowballed as I decided to do the oral history aspect of it, interviewing people about their experiences playing these games in the 1970s and 1980s, and how they did or did not relate this to the wider issues around — the nuclear threat, the Cold War, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So it snowballed into not just kind of an analysis of the games themselves and their historical context and how and why they were created, but also the oral history component, which has been really fascinating. Because you can’t study games without studying how they’re played. That would be kind of a pointless exercise — just talking about the games themselves without talking about how people played them and how people interpreted them and all that kind of thing.

And what I’m really interested in doing is investigating these games and their play as aspects of the kind of wider Cold War nuclear culture. My friend and colleague who works at University of Liverpool, John Hogg, wrote a book in 2015 called British Nuclear Culture, which is great. And he talks about the official and unofficial narratives of the nuclear age. And I’ve kind of really cottoned onto that.

These games and their play are these kind of unofficial narratives of the nuclear age, of fear of apocalypse, of dealing with the nuclear threat of interpreting the world around them. So it’s a fascinating insight into how certain individuals kind of considered the world around them and approached that world through play, or sometimes didn’t. Sometimes it was just fun.

I know a bit about table top roleplaying games — e.g., Dungeons and Dragons — but I’ve never really played one. With that in mind, tell me more about Twilight: 2000. What was it like, and what is its image of the post-nuclear world?

So in a traditional tabletop role-playing game, a group of people gather around a table. One person, often referred to as the “referee” or the “games master” or the “dungeon master,” will lead them through a pre-prepared kind of scenario or maybe semi-kind-of structured series of events. And people play different characters interacting with other characters, interacting with the environment around them and doing stuff. And these first generation role playing games that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s from the emergence of Dungeons and Dragons in 1974, were quite traditional. Combat was very central to these games. More pages were given over to combat rules than any other part of the game.

So Twilight: 2000 emerged in late 1984. And it was created by a game design studio in Illinois called Game Designers Workshop. And many of the individuals involved in this — Marc Miller, Frank Chadwick, Loren Wiseman, Thomas Mulkey — had military backgrounds. Vietnam was a really important kind of influence on their lives. And they saw a gap in the roleplaying games market, which was dominated by fantasy, was dominated by D&D. But they saw a gap in the market for a military role-playing game.

But it was a bit awkward to make it about Vietnam, or make it too close to the contemporary real world in that sense. So they decided to make it in this future war.

From an eBay listing for the original Twilight: 2000 game.

So the game itself was set in a future world of 2000, where, in the mid nineties, a war broke out between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It led to a nuclear confrontation and the characters, when you start the game, are all American soldiers who are now isolated, cut off from command, in Poland in the year 2000, after this war has taken place.

So essentially you are military personnel and you can now have this sandbox. You can now explore this post-apocalyptic Poland and do really what you want. There’s no limits on what you can do. And it was a great success. The game was easily the most successful of the military roleplaying games that emerged in the 1980s. There had been attempts to do it before. None of them achieved great market success, but Twilight: 2000, in comparative terms, was big. It sold about 100,000 copies in the first couple of years, which was big for a roleplaying game that wasn’t Dungeons and Dragons.

So it was very militaristic, you’re playing American military personnel and it’s set in this post-apocalyptic Poland, but it’s almost like a tabula rasa — it’s a blank space. It’s where you can exercise your imagination about what these mostly male characters in a post-apocalyptic world would get up to.

Where does it stand on the spectrum of post-apocalyptic imaginations? Is it grounded, or are we talking about super-mutants and giant radioactive ants?

It’s very much grounded in reality. It is essentially a modern military roleplaying game. It kind of eschews the ideas of cannibals, of radioactive zombies, of all that kind of thing. It is different from some of the other post-apocalyptic games that emerged in the same period, where you could bring in all of these things like, know, mutants and cannibals and people emerging from underground with laser eyes and all these kinds of things. So it’s very much grounded in the reality of of military simulations and wargames really, there’s a lot of, because GDW, the designers, came from a wargame design background.

One of the standard jokes about playing Twilight: 2000 was, “I’ve rolled up my gun, now I’ll create my character,” because your gun was more important.

The initial box sets had very thin reference books compared to a lot of roleplaying games, very thin books. And so you get very little detail on Poland. The Poland of Twilight: 2000 is no more real than Middle Earth. You’re given three pages of detail on post-nuclear Poland, but way more detail on tanks and rifles and artillery pieces and all of these kind of things. Even the map that you get is effectively useless. It doesn’t tell you anything about it.

And one of the interesting things about interviewing people who played this game in period, one of the first things they do would go down to the local library, and get atlases and encyclopedias and kind of Europe, maps of Europe and all that kind of thing to try and give a bit more depth and detail to their experiences of playing this game, to bring a bit more realism into it.

But in many ways, it’s a game of resource management. It has these kind of elements where, for example, there’s no petrol [gasoline] anymore, or it’s very, very scarce. So you have to distill alcohol to run your vehicles. And you spend hours doing this. The game master would make you forage for stuff to make the alcohol. And you would spend an entire evening with your friends working out how to distill alcohol. I mean, in many ways that’s a good idea, but for a game that’s not very exciting.

So there’s a lot of resource management going on to it. It does trend in some areas towards the a realist approach to the post-apocalyptic world, but in other areas it doesn’t. Like the characters are meant to be realistic, but they’re kind of Schwarzeneggerian in their ability to take damage and to deal with combat.

It sounds like it puts some interesting constraints on the imagination of what it means to live in a post-apocalyptic world.

One of the fascinating things to me about it, and many of the respondents I interviewed for the project also brought this up, was that there’s nothing in the basic rules of the game for rebuilding, for restarting civilization, for peacemaking. That just isn’t in there. It’s not part of the game. Yet, for a lot of people who are playing this game, that was the role they chose for their characters.

Sure, many people I interviewed would say, “we just drove around in a tank shooting things.” You know, that was it. But many people chose to play this game and instead said: we want to, you know, do good. We want to “restart civilization.” We want to protect people. All of these kinds of things. So people kind of interpreted the game in quite radically different ways.

You have the imagination of the game designer on the one hand, and you have imagination of the players on the other. It is interesting where they don’t align, no? In a computer game, the options for the player are typically much more restrained, but in a tabletop roleplaying game, there seems to be inherently more flexibility for the players to interpret the game, and its meaning, in a way that aligns with their own interests, values, and goals.

Yes, absolutely. It’s one of the great things that some of the people I’ve interviewed have shared with me. They’ve still got their old materials from playing these games and they’re very kindly photographed and sent me these old road atlases and maps from the 1980s that they’d photocopied in their local library and annotated. These artifacts are absolutely fascinating to see how people interpreted all this.

Twilight: 2000 also had a thread of supplements called “Going Home,” where you are American soldiers, and you get to this German port, and you’re gonna get the last ship back to the United States. And that transitions to a new kind of a different phase of the game where all the subsequent adventure modules really were focused on the US.

And that was interesting in and of itself, because there was almost an inbuilt assumption that going home was the ultimate aim of the game. It’s a game written by Americans, published by an American company. The vast majority of people buying the game lived in the United States. That’s all very explicable. For those of us on this side of the Atlantic, actually, that was kind of cool. You get to play in this post-apocalyptic United States, like all the films we’ve watched and all that kind of thing.

What are some other examples of games from this period that you’ve studied?

So a bit earlier, in the late 1970s, we see the very first post-apocalyptic roleplaying games. And a lot of people when asked would say that the first post-apocalyptic role-playing game is a game called Gamma World, which was produced by TSR, the people behind Dungeons & Dragons. But actually it was beaten to the punch by this incredibly obscure game, a game so obscure I don’t even have a copy of it, called The Realm of Yolmi. And all you need to know about that is the United States is ruled by an undead Walter Cronkite.

Anyway, about three months later, TSR produced Gamma World, which was based on some earlier ideas that they had. And Gamma World is almost the opposite of Twilight: 2000. It is this mad combination of a nuclear and biological war, hundreds of years into the future, and you can literally have a character who is a psychic rabbit with lasers for eyes. Or can play a walking Rhododendron bush, that can talk as well. Don’t ask me to explain any of this.

And this all exists in the detritus of American society from hundreds of years before. So one of the classic images from the game is one of these characters on the cover of a book using an old battered stop sign as a shield.

So it’s this utterly ludicrous gonzo take on the threat of nuclear war and what might happen after it with these, know, these crazy mutations and all these kinds of things. And it very much draws upon that particular and more phantasmagoric strand of science fiction from the like 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, where everything was mutants and cannibals and strange mutated animals.

It was a very, very different from Twilight: 2000. And you can see, if you look into the progression of these kind of games, that there’s a definite kind of bridge between the late 1970s, kind of gonzo stuff, but then you kind of bridge over in the early 1980s, where you get into the Reagan era, and you start seeing these harder-edged games like Twilight: 2000.

What’s your sense about where the bulk of these kinds of games fell, on a spectrum between the “gonzo” Gamma World and the “realistic” Twilight: 2000?

So plausibility and realism certainly dominated. Gamma World carried on in print for years. I mean, it was very popular. But it was one of the kind of you know, a stand out, because it would be very difficult to do another Gamma World. TSR had that market sewn up. They were the big dog in roleplaying games. but I think there was more of a leaning towards, especially when we get into the 1980s, when Twilight: 2000 proved there’s a market for the more realistic, militaristic games.

Since then, there’s much more of a tendency towards realism. So for example, you have games like The Morrow Project, whose book was deliberately designed to look like a US Army training manual. And in the back of it, it references Jane’s Infantry Weapons, and all of these huge list of American military manuals that were drawn on for the creation of this game.

The Morrow Project was kind of a bridge between say Gamma World and Twilight: 2000. You’re these “elites of society” who’ve been frozen for 150 years, and you wake up and, my God, there’s been an apocalypse. And you go out there and you’re going to rebuild civilization and recreate the world. And you think, this is all very hard-edged, and there’s a lot of stuff taken from modern military manuals, and all that kind thing. But there’s radioactive cannibal zombies and all that kind of thing and mutants and all these kind of things. So, The Morrow Project is an interesting kind of combination of that. It’s very like Fallout, a precursor to it.

And then you also have Aftermath, which is possibly one of the most complicated role playing games I have ever encountered in my life. It is really what was called in terms of rules, “crunch.” There is a lot of arithmetic and a lot of mathematics and a lot of numbers involved in it. But Aftermath was this kind of sandbox, which you allowed to create your own apocalypse. It didn’t just have to be nuclear. It can be environmental, could be alien invasion, all of these kinds of things.

And these games like Aftermath and The Morrow Project, they were very much more realistically grounded than Gamma World. And they’re kind of a bridge to Twilight: 2000. They weren’t huge successes. But then Twilight: 2000 demonstrated that there was a certain market you could make money from for this more hard-edged, realistic game play and their approach to the world, as opposed to trying to do another Gamma World. So realism was always much more on the agenda, it seems to me.

If you were going to pick one of these kinds of games to run with a group today — maybe a group of people your age now and not teenagers — what’s the game you would choose?

I don’t even need to think about that. It would be the 1986 classic, The Price of Freedom. It is fascinating. It posits a United States that was invaded by the Soviet Union. Here’s the blurb from the back cover:

A gutless president has been elected. America has signed international agreements prohibiting Star Wars defenses. The Soviet Union has developed a shield against nuclear attack. The Soviet premier demands American surrender. The president complies. Soviet troops are landing in your hometown. In this, it’s darkest hour, America needs heroes. Are you willing to pay... the price of freedom?

Brilliant. It is essentially Red Dawn, the roleplaying game. And it created a firestorm of controversy on this side of the Atlantic when it came out.

In the pages of the main gaming magazine, the UK’s White Dwarf, Twilight: 2000 created controversy over the themes — “is it appropriate to play a game set in your future nuclear apocalypse?” The Price of Freedom kicked off an even bigger firestorm because it was seen as jingoistic, ultra-conservative, everything that the people in the UK would just in a knee-jerk way think of when they thought about the United States and its worst aspects in this period.

But it was a joke! It was written by Greg Costikyan, the arch satirist of role-playing games. And Price of Freedom was a satire, but just he did it so straight-facedly that a lot of people just didn’t get the joke, didn’t see how, this was a pastiche of Red Dawn, of ultra-conservative fears of subversion in the United States, and everything.

And he has some brilliant little game rules in it that should have given you a hint. So in combat, American characters can never panic. Only the Soviets and their “quisling lap dogs” can panic in combat. Americans are always steadfast. But so few people got the joke because he did the satire so straight-faced. It’s all meant to be a gag.

You’ve also made your own games. Tell me about one of those.

So I’ll go with the post-apocalyptic one that I wrote, which is called Hot War, which is set in London in the winter of 1963, a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis went hot. It was a follow-up to a game I had written previously called Cold City, which was set in Berlin in 1950 and involved international occult monster hunting.

Hot War, though, was very much influenced by my teenage experiences playing games like Twilight: 2000. And I wanted to write a game that, rather than just provide the sandbox for driving around shooting things, emphasized the themes, for example, that come out of films like Threads, that the apocalypse is about human relationships, about community, about the breakdown of society. So that was very much embedded in the experience of play in Hot War.

You can go through an entire game of Hot War and there’s never any physical combat. It can take place, but it’s not central to the play experience. It’s much more about how individuals and groups cope with the abject collapse of society while trying to keep some aspects of society together. So that was very much my intention influenced by my teenage years of playing certain kinds of games and emphasizing those themes because that’s what I enjoy. That’s what I enjoy in games. I’m not really interested in sitting there rolling dice for a firefight these days. I may have enjoyed that as a teenager, but not now.

I wrote Hot War back in 2008, but now there’s a second edition of it, which I’ve just finished working on, which is based on the best part of a couple of decades of greater experience. In 2008, I wasn’t an academic, I’d not done my master’s, I’d not done my PhD. So I’ve been able to go back to it and both improve the gameplay and also improve the historical underpinnings of it.

Games aren’t textbooks and they shouldn’t be treated as such. But I also like it to have an educative aspect that will tell people a little something that maybe they didn’t know about Britain’s Cold War experiences. So I’ve embedded a lot of that into the game itself. So for example, in the game mechanics, there’s something called “breakdown,” which is, the breakdown of society, and that can influence what happens in the game. And “breakdown” is the word that was used in British government documents of the period to describe the collapse of society as well. So it’s drawing very much on the documentary evidence, like the Strath Report of 1955.

Do you feel your work studying, making, and playing these kinds of games has changed how you conceptualize something like nuclear war and its aftermath?

I don’t know if it’s changed what I think about it. I mean, certainly, I also think it’s about what would you do?

I mean, going back to my childhood, I grew up just up the hill from Grangemouth Oil Refinery, which was in the 1980s, which was the biggest oil refinery in the UK, one of the biggest in Europe. And we all knew, growing up, that it was a major target. It was gonna get hit.

We had Grangemouth Refinery and then just on the other side of the river was the Rosyth Naval Dockyard. And then on one side of us we had Edinburgh, the other side we had Glasgow. We were going to be dead in the event of a nuclear war.

I’ve been going through the British government documents and some of it is, as you’ll know yourself, it’s just so outlandish and so at odds with the way that things would actually transpire. In many ways, it makes me a bit more fatalistic. I think things would actually be a lot worse than people expect them to be. I’m more of the Threads kind of thinking, like, things are gonna be really bad, and hopefully it never happens!