Dammit, skofflox has gotten me thinking about T2k again...and I'd been looking at the rules, the first adventure (Escape from Kalisz), and so on and I thought I'd kick the tires a bit, see what you all think.

Problem #1 is the "Escape from Kalisz" premise.  

If we assume a united Germany, in spite of all else (and it is stated in the background that the Soviets and other Eastern Bloc forces were successfully ejected from Germany) and that Germany is "relatively" safer than Poland, then getting to Berlin or the ruins thereof is a 250 mile drive.  Or about four hours from Kalisz proper.  If you treble that because of detours off the main highways (not too difficult to imagine - area denial munitions, blast craters, etc.), you're still looking at leaving Kalisz at noon and getting to Berlin around midnight.  If you say you're only going to go to Frankfurt am Oder, you're only talking about three hours.  

But lets assume you don't let the party have that vehicle + full gas tank that you can by default start out with...

Say you're legging it.  It's a two day hike from Kalisz, which you're not starting in but instead miles west of, to Frankfurt am Oder.  Even dodging patrols, you're still only talking about a week, tops.  Now...even the best of RPGs can have a "fifteen minute day", so assuming that, and assuming you don't meet another US military unit already headed that way (unlikely - a 7000 man division with dozens of tanks, trucks, PCs, LAVs, etc. etc. has scattered and is running west), and assuming you're not role playing time as a 1:1 consideration, at most, getting back to Germany is a few sessions at most.  Call it seven.

Problem #2 is Poland itself, although less so.  By 2000 (in that game's timeline) Poland has been fought over for five years plus, and many of those battles involve nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.  Whole towns have been just erased off the map.  Still, if you look at a google maps satellite (or just topographic) view, Poland is absolutely densely packed with towns, hamlets and villages.  

So where does this leave the prospective Twilight:2000 Referee, regardless of system?  I think there's a few options.  One, you could say that the unification wasn't successful, but then where did The Last Battle take place?  I hardly think a hostile East Germany would just sit back and let NATO drive past into Poland, then come waltzing back through after getting their asses kicked, and if we move the battle west we still have the same issue of "can get to a safe zone in a very short amount of time", just in a different place.  Or, alternately, you could put them with the Marines in Romania, and have that have been a different front but with the same outcome.  Or, you could have them already stateside, with an eye on the Return to Europe series later on down the line.

Your thoughts, fellow gamers?

Set it in 2015. Russia has noted that the Amrican public is war-weary, Europe is a financial basket case that couldn't defeat a cold, and since most American troops are still tied up in Afghanistan and Iraq, they decide its time to dust off the Hammer and Sickle for another go (I don't think they ever really did give up on it, but that's another story).

So, the Warsaw Pact Reunification Tour begins a couple of years from now, and Poland turns out to be a tougher nut to crack then previously thought. Once they do pacify Poland and other, more easterly, countries - based on the lack of real response from the West - they decide to move on Germany, about the only financially stable country left on the continent. Station the troops at the German/Polish border, light the match, and step back.

That's also when the US and Europe decide all of the strongly worded letters are insufficient and decide to drop a few nukes. Hey, its only Poland after all. Oh, and maybe a few other places.

So, that might be a solution to your problem.

(Also, it is supremely creepy that the theme to "Hunt for Red October" came up in the iPod rotation while I was writing this.)

That...is definitely worth looking in to.  I like it better than the batshit insane scenario outlined in T:2013.

Incidentally, speaking of Iraq, did you (or anyone else interested) ever read the RDF Sourcebook?  Yeah, might as well have not been a Twilight War.  There's a Surface Action Group parked in the Gulf (the Carl Vinson and some missile cruisers), Israel is producing/selling aircraft to friendly (i.e., US) forces, the aforementioned Carl Vinson has aircraft on call for air support.  The USAF has the equivalent of a tac air wing in theater, and there's plenty of gas for the plenty of armored vehicles there.

But I digress.  In my T2k everything east of the Jordan is pretty much like Mad Max with both CivGov and MilGov struggling to get the forces that are there organized and at least get the RDF pulled out and back home with their gear and hopefully a little avgas...