Seeing this place again after all these years is enough to bring even a jaded warrior like you to tears. You see the happy and the innocent in this green utopia. They don’t all realize how beautiful this place is. Some of them believe that life is as hard as it will ever be or that the world is a terrible place.
In four years, they will come to know the truth: that sadness, hardship, and cruelty will be redefined on April 21, 2011 when the nuclear horror of Judgment Day is unleashed on an unsuspecting world. The old definition of sadness will be superseded by the deaths of billions. Their uninformed ideas about hardship will be re-evaluated in light of days spent hiding from soulless hunters and nights spend scrounging for what scraps of food might be found in the refuse. The long-held meaning of cruelty will seem as cruel as the embrace of an old friend when placed beside the relentless implacable destruction of an invincible army of machines.
You have a chance, however slight, of changing the future for all of them - the innocent and the machines alike. If skill, luck, and steadfast allies are with you, what is your future may become just a memory in the minds of a silent scarred few.
Judgment Day is a short form campaign designed to be played over six to eight gaming sessions of three to five hours each. It uses a variant of the Gumshoe system from Pelgrane Press and is based in the mythos of the Terminator series. The Gumshoe system was chosen for what, on the surface might naturally seem to be a high-action tactical game because of the general futility of engaging Terminators in a straight-up fight. Gameplay should focus on gathering clues, making plans, and executing plans. There should be combat between the characters and the agents of SkyNet, but such fights are terribly one-sided and should mainly involve escaping from or trapping the attacking Terminator. combat is really quite lethal, especially when cybernetic killing machines from the future are concerned, so be warned.
Player characters are all agents of the Resistance against the Machines, sent back from 2028 to 2007. Playing temporal natives is certainly an option and something your players might request. Some suggestions appear in the character creation chapter for how to adapt existing character roles to represent people from 2007. Playing Resistance-allied (reprogrammed) Terminators is outside the scope of these rules. If your players have no problems with one of them being phenomenally more effective in combat than the rest, then the Terminator rules may certainly be adapted for player-character use.