Taps

By now, many of you will have noticed that I haven’t posted any updates about the Barrett’s Raiders Twilight: 2000 campaign I’ve been refereeing since December 2021 – almost four years ago. The reason is simple: the campaign has, alas, come to an end. By “end,” I don’t mean “conclusion.” This is nothing like the tidy finale of the House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign last month. In this case, the end wasn’t planned, though, if I’m honest, it wasn’t entirely unexpected either.

Before getting into a proper postmortem of Barrett’s Raiders, let me explain what brought things to a close. There’s nothing dramatic here, nor did anyone grow dissatisfied with the game. Two players had real life commitments that would keep them away for an extended period, long enough that I decided to put the campaign on “pause” and let another player run a short game of his own – Fringeworthy – while we waited for their return. We’d taken short breaks like this before, so I didn’t anticipate any problems.

This time, though, the pause became an opportunity for another player to decide it was time to bow out. I don’t blame him at all. He’d been with the group almost continuously since the days of my Riphaeus Sector Traveller campaign, which began around 2017. That’s a long commitment. As I told my House of Worms players before we began The Dark Between the Stars Fading Suns campaign (as I've taken to calling it), no one is ever obligated to keep playing, especially after giving years of their time. Interests shift; life happens.

Soon after, I learned that one of the two players already on hiatus would, in fact, be unavailable even longer – effectively out of commission well into 2026. I took that as the universe’s gentle nudge that it was time to put Barrett’s Raiders to bed. We were now down two players and, truth be told, I had already been contemplating wrapping things up within the next few months anyway.

My own reasons were different. I was still very happy with the direction of the campaign. The characters’ return to the shattered USA intrigued me more than their time in Poland. I was eager to see them navigate the murky waters of the low-intensity, slow-motion civil war between USMEA, the civilian government, and New America. I’d been waiting to run this part of the campaign since I was a teenager and had no shortage of plans for where it might go.

What held me back, frankly, were the rules. While I’ve used the Year Zero Engine to good effect in other games – Forbidden Lands in particular – the Twilight: 2000 iteration had to wrestle with elements like modern automatic weapons and vehicles that simply don’t arise in Forbidden Lands. Their inclusion felt clunky to me or at least out of step with my own preferences and I regularly found myself fumbling with them more than I liked. As a result, I often avoided combat, which isn’t ideal in a military RPG.

So, while I’m disappointed that Barrett’s Raiders won’t reach the proper conclusion I had hoped for, I’m not too disappointed. The campaign lasted just shy of four years – no small feat – and we had a great deal of fun along the way. I doubt Barrett’s Raiders will be remembered in the same breath as House of Worms, but that’s a very high bar, one I may never clear again. Such is life.

Instead of dwelling on what might have been, I’m already thinking about the future: what game might this group tackle next, and where might it take us? More on that when I finally have an answer to those questions.