d20 2300AD ?!

[TKalbfus]

Variants are fine, indeed part of what makes near future SF fun, but it seems to me that 2300 is built on the assumption that something happens in the late 20th/early 21st Century to derail the current forward march of technology. Dropping it entirely would alter the "present" of 2300 significantly: not a problem for personal campaigns but it would make newly published material incompatible with the previous edition.


Ever consider the idea of dual timelines existing side-by-side? I this setting the Twilight war both happened and did not happen. Something happened in 1990 Russia during the coup. In one version Boris Yeltsin was killed and the coup plotters succeeded. The Soviet Union was still in decline afterwards but went out with a bang rather than a whimper taking the United States with it. The Twilight War happened as did the the original 2300 timeline. The other timeline is our timeline up to 2003, this timeline gets vague between 2003 and 2050, but by 2050, the US and several other nations have colonies on Mars. By 2100 a unified Martian government forms. Perhaps the war of terror continues as well. By the time 2300 rolls around the world looks different from the old 2300. In both timelines the stutterwarp engine is developed. the barrier between these two universes is somewhat thin. Perhaps certain events can lead to a transfer from one timeline to another. The Stutterwarp for example when not working properly might cause a transference from one universe to the other. Certain ancient artifacts discovered on unexplored planets might cause this transference. Perhaps time travel from the future was involved in changing the timeline. A visitor from the Future might have either caused World War III or prevented it. Perhaps a third campaign could evolve between competing Time Travellers from different time lines. One could be French and the other American. How does that sound?

 

[ctskerry]

Originally posted by Aramis:

I'd prefer BTRC's CORPS... easy gun design- official is 3g3. Easy vehicle design, CORPS VDS.

but I dream.

Just a new version of the background, even sans rules, would be good. [/QB]

Hmm, I forgot about that one, yeah CORPS would be nice or maybe even EABA.

Kerry

 

[TKalbfus]

Originally posted by Aramis:

I'd prefer BTRC's CORPS... easy gun design- official is 3g3. Easy vehicle design, CORPS VDS.


I never heard of the BTRC CORPS, do they where these initials on their t-shirts? Is easy gun design important for the 3g3 (9 G) environment? I think if a gun is easy to design and build, you could build it yourself. Is the CORPS VDS the sworn enemy of the BTRC CORPS or are they allies? I can picture the whole battle now. One contigent of BTRS CORPS squaring off against the VDS corps all firing off their easy-to-design guns at each other. Wow what a sight that would be!

 

[TKalbfus]

How about doing a PreTraveller Setting. That is Traveller 2300 using the Traveller timeline in the year 2300 during the first Interstellar War.

 

[ctskerry]

Originally posted by Tom Kalbfus:
How about doing a PreTraveller Setting. That is Traveller 2300 using the Traveller timeline in the year 2300 during the first Interstellar War.

Apparently SJ Games is doing an Interstellar Wars campaign book for Traveller.

Kerry

 

[kafka47]

I wonder if the d20 2300AD is a rich enough market with Transhuman Space taking up most of the Hard SF market. As I can only see d20 2300AD working if it brings something fundamentally new the storyline. Nations striking up colonies in 2300AD rather than a gritty Hard SF background, like what was seen in the early Challenge articles seems to be ripe. Any thoughts?

 

[Gallowglass]

Originally posted by kafka47:
I wonder if the d20 2300AD is a rich enough market with Transhuman Space taking up most of the Hard SF market. As I can only see d20 2300AD working if it brings something fundamentally new the storyline. Nations striking up colonies in 2300AD rather than a gritty Hard SF background, like what was seen in the early Challenge articles seems to be ripe. Any thoughts?

I think radically changing the 2300AD setting (it's not a story line: that's a narrative someone tells you, this is a backdrop for a game; pedantic of me, but I think the distinction is important and forgetting it is a common mistake cf T:TNE) would be in danger of making it not 2300AD anymore, but certainly any new 2300AD release would have to stake out it's territory quite clearly and, as the later history of the original run showed, mixed messsages don't help. 2300 didn't work when it tried to be cyberpunk and dystopian (E/CS) and frankly it largely ignored human transformation (DNAM's were never very clearly developed IMO) and as you say, that territory is currently well served by GURPS with Transhuman Space.

So I think a "new" 2300AD would have to renew it's claim to a near future in which, whilst technology has advanced, human culture _hasn't_ undergone a major paradigm shift, nor is there one looming, in which politics and economics seem very familiar at times. I think "enhancements" to the core canon setting (the Beta Aquilae cluster for example) should be included and expanded, and I think perhaps it's worth looking at canon sources such as Bayern, the medusae material from Nyotokendu and the history of the Ebers for ways to expand to "horizons" of the setting without invalidating what has gone before or loosing it's essential appeal.

Now having said all that, in the current economic climate and especially with the various GURPS offerings (not just THS but Alpha Centauri and the GT Interstellar Wars line) it may be that 2300 is too much of a niche and QLI would be better off writing an entirely new near future SF setting...

 

[TWILIGHT]

I have to agree with gallowglass. Cyber stuff in 2300AD just cheapens the setting. As explained elsewhere (not sure where!) the fun of 2300 is that it directly reflects the 18th-19th century age of expansion on earth. 2300 is essentially already an alternative history and disturbing that would move away from it's 'colonialist endeavour' route and into a dystopian area such as SLA, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, Transhuman Space, etc, etc. Why change something realistic and unique into something run of the mill?

 

[kafka47]

One should always the cyber-tech add-ons for 2300AD were meant only for the Core worlds - Earth & the Alpha Centura system.

I am all for preserving and expanding the frontier spirit, but, I think more ought to be done to make the worlds more unfriendly for humans. As the chances of finding Earth-like worlds in the local stellar neighbourhood are pretty remote. The setting ought to emphasis more deep-space habitation and trying to carve out spaces on new worlds which would lead to a conflict between colonies and home country.

 

[TKalbfus]

One should always the cyber-tech add-ons for 2300AD were meant only for the Core worlds - Earth & the Alpha Centura system.

I am all for preserving and expanding the frontier spirit, but, I think more ought to be done to make the worlds more unfriendly for humans. As the chances of finding Earth-like worlds in the local stellar neighbourhood are pretty remote. The setting ought to emphasis more deep-space habitation and trying to carve out spaces on new worlds which would lead to a conflict between colonies and home country.

Why shouldn't bionics be allowed of the frontier? Is it that people with such things need to visit a factory every week for repairs and maintenence? Is it that a lot of apare parts are needed and that shipping them across space is too costly to be justified? And why is it disutopian. There are a lot of people without legs or arms who wouldn't think so.

 

[Gallowglass]

Originally posted by kafka47:
One should always the cyber-tech add-ons for 2300AD were meant only for the Core worlds - Earth & the Alpha Centura system.

True, but it also tried to impose an "early cyberpunk" dystopian style on earth / the core which felt (IMO) very sloppy and retro-fitted, trying to convert the core, after the fact, into a Bladerunner compatible world. Now this might be a fun settings - but it's not what 2300AD was originally and I have misgivings about it being taken in that direction again, just for commercial reasons: how then is it different to either THS or Digital Burn?

I am all for preserving and expanding the frontier spirit, but, I think more ought to be done to make the worlds more unfriendly for humans. As the chances of finding Earth-like worlds in the local stellar neighbourhood are pretty remote. The setting ought to emphasis more deep-space habitation and trying to carve out spaces on new worlds which would lead to a conflict between colonies and home country.

Here I think there is definte possibilities. The original 2300AD had a massive over-emphasis on planets: where were all the space habitats, orbiting colonies and such? Andy Slack did a good article and that is something that could definetly be expanded on. Likewise, I think more emphasis on obtaining resources from hosile world would be good.

However... the 2300AD material published so far has an underlying set of assumptions (about the frequency of sentient life, the occurence of habitable worlds, the nature of local astrography and FTL dirve mechanisms and other things) and not all of those assumptions were consciously articulated by the original designers. Changing any of them will change the natuire of the setting. It strikes me that any serious attempt to re-launch 2300AD as a settings would need to revied teh published material pretty carefully and articulate ALL those assumptions and then very carefully evaluated any proposed changes. Because too many changes and we will end up with a radically different near future SF setting taht just happens to be called 2300AD, and that I think would be foolish (look what happened with Traveller:2300 vs 2300AD!).

I note that the d20 2300AD book is now listed at the T20 site as in development, so it will be intriguing to see if anyone steps up to the plate to try and write it...

 

[Gallowglass]

Originally posted by thrash:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by kafka47:
I am all for preserving and expanding the frontier spirit, but, I think more ought to be done to make the worlds more unfriendly for humans. As the chances of finding Earth-like worlds in the local stellar neighbourhood are pretty remote. The setting ought to emphasis more deep-space habitation and trying to carve out spaces on new worlds which would lead to a conflict between colonies and home country.

The Company War Roleplaying Game: Science Fiction Adventures in CJ Cherryh's Alliance/Union Universe? </font>[/QUOTE]I would buy it in a second, hell I'd probably be prepared to commit fairly serious crimes in order to have a crack at writing it (though actually I'd rather someone competent like Jo Grant of CORE did it...).

I do wonder whatever happened to the possibility of a GURPS book, it's ten years since the fable discussion of said possibility and it's not appeared. Hmm, a possible vehicle for T5 perhaps...

 

[kafka47]

But looking back over the Challenge articles there was the frontier spirit combined with the hostle environment. I think there was a determined effort to make a hard SF background, that is why I would advance the timeline forward. Breaking free of the local arms through Brown Dwarf backdoors would not alter the milieu terribly...until they come into contact with the Vilani...

 

[Rodina]

I don't really care if the timeline is moved forward or shifted a bit to adjust for the lack of WW3 or not.

Still, in case this does happen, I'm dusting off my notes for a campaign I once ran which involved the Japanese-American Professional Baseball League on Tirane, construction contracts on Chengdu, the French Domestic Intelligence Service, OQC, and the US Library of Congress.

I'll try to draft it up as a full length module.

 

[Gallowglass]

Originally posted by kafka47:
But looking back over the Challenge articles there was the frontier spirit combined with the hostle environment. I think there was a determined effort to make a hard SF background, that is why I would advance the timeline forward. Breaking free of the local arms through Brown Dwarf backdoors would not alter the milieu terribly...until they come into contact with the Vilani...

Well first off, there are, in the cannon 2300AD universe, NO Vilani to run into: it is (and always has been, first edition name confusion aside) a DIFFERENT UNIVERSE. 2300AD is NOT the early history of the Traveller Universe (although Andy Slack did a very creditable job of marrying the two time lines)! Sorry to be a bit strident, but this point of confusion did BOTH games some harm in the mid eighties IMO and it's actually rather depressing to see it still in circulation 15 years later...

Second, breaking freee of the local arms via Brown Dwarfs/Stutterwarp II has been debated (at times rather fiercley) on the 2300AD mailing list. Without re-opening that debate, suffice to say that there is a school of thought that argues that this _radically_ changes the setting: the choke points that define military operations amongst the established colonies are altered, the whole nature of exploration alters if more worlds are within short journey reach of Earth.

Now, having said all that, as I mentioned before, I think the Beta Aquilae cluster and some other Challenge material should be included into a revised core 2300AD seting. And carefully evaluated alterations to the NSL that allow the settings to be expanded ('more of the same', as it were) rather than altered in to something different would be a good idea and (along with de-emphasising the E/CS dystopianism) re-capturing the high frontier feel is key. In fact, I would guess this is one reason for the games existing bias towards planets: tin cans in space can rapidly become bland and samey (Cherryh's have a 'slow' FTL to help diversify the cultures) and ultimately the vaguaries of planetology and xenobiology are a more reliable source of 'sense of wonder'.

The following is a bit of a rant. My apologies. IN my defense, I'm knackered (and have a migraine coming on I think) and the modern obsession with timelines and meta-plot really annoys me. Feel free to ignore any of the following and please accept my apologies if any of it is a bit harshly worded.

As for advancing the timeline, I'm a sceptic. Timelines rapidly become proscriptive straight-jackets that make my game diverge from official material making it less useful (and therefore less likely I'll buy it). IME for every gamer who thinks timelines are cool you'll find two who either ignore them or have abondoned a setting (and sometimes the game that went with it) because the official time-line didn't suite them for whatever reason. For me, the best backgrounds are snap-shots of an exciting moment in time. I have no objection to a broad brush idea of where things might go, but I prefer the freedom to take them where I want and still be able to easily adapt official products five years later to my version of the setting. Glorantha (which has essentially never advanced beyond 1620, just elaborated it in ever greater detail), or Call of Cthulhu (where a broad brush grasp of history underpins what each ref chooses to do and certain events are tide to specific dates from 'canon') are good models: they allow me to keep buying and adapting "official" product (the baseline hasn't moved) whilst still allowing my game to have a sense of history and place.

And I have said it before and will no doubt say it again: RPG supplelemnts and settings are NOT fiction, they are reference books.

I think more could be gained by doing Aurore / Nyotekundu Sourcebook style books on interesting worlds (not necessarily colonies, noyt necessarily withing established space either), or sections of space along the Arms. A revised and expanded Bayern would be very cool, and would sit well with expanding the Beat Aquilae Cluster to re-emphasise exploration as key to the setting.

 

[Rodina]

Well said.

Much as I like Traveller, I'm always a little annoyed at the continuing efforts to harness the entire Traveller universe so that there is some common, official Traveller universe (the Landgrab being only the most blatant example).

In 2300, I noticed, there was this perhaps unavoidable effort to rehabilitate the United States. I'm as patriotic as any American -- and as anti-French -- one of the cool facts about the 2300 Universe was that America was a second-tier power. Yet a lot of the later stuff - Operation Overlord, particularly, and the fact that the USS <i>Columbia</i> won the day at Queen Alice's Star - kind of reglorified the United States in a way that pushed the game focus back toward the US.

Updated timelines, I think, similarly regress game universes to the mean. Instead of exploring Manchurian politics along the Chinese Arm -- or developing more about, I dunno, Japanese political corruption on Joi, there was this heavy emphasis on telling us what happens in 2302 and 2304 and 2308 or whatever. I felt straightjacketed even though, I know, I could ignore it at will.

 

[Colin]

I would like to see the timeline advanced, maybe 20 years or so. 2300 AD is being republished, so why go over the same ground? You could just make a book that was a D20 version of the 2300AD game as written, but that adds no value to the setting. Just as T20 wasn't a rehash of "Golden Age" Travller, so D20 2300 shouldn't be a rehash of classic 2300. Add something to the setting, like stutterwarp tugs along the flight of the Bayern, opening the Beta Aquilae cluster, maybe add alien PCs, and shift the politics around.

But keep the same flavor, the same basic worldview of an expanding civilization that is not much different from where we are now.

 

[Captain Tylor]

My take on a 'future' 2300AD timeline? I had always felt that due to their performance in the Kafer War and their colony on Aurore being in a strategic place, Ukraine would become the next major player on the world/interstellar stage circa 2306 or so.

 

[kafka47]

Guys, I was only joking about meeting the Vilani. Although, it is something that I have configured IMTU. This afterall is a Traveller Board. <sigh>

 

[Gallowglass]

Originally posted by kafka47:
Guys, I was only joking about meeting the Vilani. Although, it is something that I have configured IMTU. This afterall is a Traveller Board. <sigh>

I did apologise for being strident!

And I re-reading, I was in a serious grump yesterday. And if I'm honest, Andy Slack's timeline (that melds the 2300AD and OTU universes) is a cracking setting in it's own right.

But 2300AD is a game and setting in its own right and should be discussed as such, so nyah-nyah (as my eight year still occasionally says)

Colin:

I would like to see the timeline advanced, maybe 20 years or so. 2300 AD is being republished, so why go over the same ground? You could just make a book that was a D20 version of the 2300AD game as written, but that adds no value to the setting. Just as T20 wasn't a rehash of "Golden Age" Travller, so D20 2300 shouldn't be a rehash of classic 2300. Add something to the setting, like stutterwarp tugs along the flight of the Bayern, opening the Beta Aquilae cluster, maybe add alien PCs, and shift the politics around.

erm, actually T20 goes BACK in the timeline of the OTU, to 993. And funnily enough one of the first 2300 games I encountered was 2200AD, set a century earlier in the timeline - MUCH closer tio the Twilight War, before ANY Alien contact. Cool setting actually...

The things you suggested to add to the setting are ones I (and others, I claim no credit here!) have already mentioned, so why spin the time line forward when these things can be added to the existing 2300 setting? Spinning forward 20 years forces someone to take decisions about the disposition of the Kafers, the Ylii and such and then imposes those decisons on everyone who plays 2300, or they have to ignore the new version. Providing more detail on the 2303 setting (including expanding Beta Aquilae, the Bayern route, Stutterwarp tugs etc) expands and enriches the setting, whilst leaving those cuddly bugs available to all and not imposing anyone's take on the future on anybody.

But one thing does appear to be emerging: everyone liked the "New Frontier/Exploration" side of 2300 and wants to see more of it, not less.