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I have read this great game now and I’m really impressed! Twilight 2000 exceeded my expectations with a big margin, and the expectations were high to start with! I think the rules hit the exact spot between playability and crunch, and the world-building is very well done. With the rules, I also appreciate the extremely solid and gamy aspect - they cover combat and survival situations very thoroughly, and there is little need for life-death on-the-spot rulings for the GM.

So now I’m playing with an idea for a campaign, taking the PC:s from Poland to Sweden (to use the most of what is released so far, and to get the “get the hell out of Kalisz” from my swedish perspective). My game group can have a hard time to get a game going just by personal motivations, big dreams and such, and usually works best with a clear objective. So far, I have come up with this:

During autumn 1998 several swedish paratrooper platoons were dropped around Kaliningrad to engage in long range recon and guerilla warfare behind enemy lines. They were not expected to survive for long, but several groups managed to exfiltrate into Poland and joined with NATO forces there during 1999.

Some or all of the PC:s could thus be swedish paratroopers in the Polish operation Reset, working with NATO special forces, joined with local militias, or just included as ragtag members in NATO infantry.

During the battle of Kalisz, a civilian transport plane of unknown origin was shot down, crashing close to where some PC:s are. In the wreckage, the campaign McGuffin was found - a folder with an advanced and extremely secret soviet plan for nuking the remains of the swedish and NATO military in Sweden.

The folder tells about a dozen GRU infiltrators in the swedish army that have planted small suitcase-nukes that they plan to detonate on a given date a few months from now. The nukes are placed in almost all the remaining NATO bases in Sweden, but they still need to place a few more during the coming months. In the document, it is clear that GRU has assets listening in to both US and swedish comms, and also infiltrators in the command center of both organisations. The extent of these infiltrators are however not revealed by the folder. If there is evidence that anything has leaked about this plan, the infiltrators will immediately radio the GRU operatives on the ground that will detonate the nukes instantly.

In the small HQ in Kalisz where the PC:s start, it’s obvious that this plan can not be radioed to Sweden even with encrypted channels. Instead, a hurried plan is devised to send several small groups towards Sweden to find and give the folder to trusted special forces commanders there, and then neutralise the nukes in a small coordinated operation.

The PC:s are one of these groups, and each group can include any trusted personnel from Kalisz no matter ethnicity (so all PC:s will do fine).

Shortly after that, the HQ is hit by artillery and everybody flees in panic - the rushed hexcrawl towards Sweden can start!

Any ideas how to flesh this out or any other comments will be much appreciated!

My first comment applies to any rushed hexcrawl: just be aware that with enough luck, it's possible to get out of Poland VERY quickly. This has always been a thing in T2K though, all the way back to 1st edition. And in any case if your players pull that off then, ok... they're just on a new hex map in Sweden! GM scrambling has been mitigated.

In general I think your idea is just a little James Bond for my own personal preference, but if it works for you then that's all well and good. And I can certainly respect the issue with getting players motivated to pursue self-generated goals, it's pretty tough and seems even moreso in this game than most, unless your group is pretty well aligned in background, task, and purpose. Mine is... not.

I do have a player who wanted to play a Swedish special operator. This was the one thing he seemed really into, even though we weren't going to have our game set in Sweden itself, so I let him have it. The answer I came up with is that he was the only survivor of a small detachment sent by Sweden to cross-train with NATO forces on resistance applicable to the home front. He was in Poland to learn the local TTPs effective against Soviet forces and weapons and report them back. Then the situation deteriorated to such a state that became impossible, at least for now. This has provided a pretty grounded basis to operate from, for the most part.

That would be my main comment on your scenario: how do you ground and justify the idea that for some reason super extreme high-security Soviet plans for actions in Sweden were being flown in a plane around an extremely dangerous warzone, in another country entirely?

Haha yes can certainly agree with the James Bondy and your other concerns I think it would work decently for my group though, if fleshed out a bit more. Perhaps taking it down a notch and not having nukes, but assasins for key personell instead... The civ plane would be some sort of spy on the other side, getting reared away by still operable soviet SAM-systems over the baltic sea perhaps?

Alternatively, you could have your campaign kick off with a mission to raid a GRU facility or capture an officer. This could reveal the plans, or perhaps an encryption code or device that then slightly further down the road reveals the same plan you've outlined otherwise. At the same time, the events of the push happen and now your guys are completely cut off from being able to get back to HQ as it withdraws west.

You could also start with the Soviet plan being infiltrators and assassinations and then escalate the reveal of the plans over time to include a nuke, and so on. That might be more exciting in the long-term, but it's also much less of a Big Sexy Hook out of the gate.