#2300ad

Rotten to the Core (1990) is the last 2300AD supplement. It is primarily a sourcebook detailing Libreville, the city in Gabon, Africa (in 2300, part of the French empire) where the space elevator, amusingly referred to as the “Beanstalk” is anchored. Naturally, this sort of aperture to the stars is going to encourage a lot of power, money and corruption, making it an excellent venue for cyberpunk. I will say, despite a lot of reasonably realistic things going on in this book, it is weirdly white for a city in Africa, even allowing for the colonial imperialism of the French empire and the probable riptide-like currents of gentrification that would beset a place like Libreville.

Anyway, if you take your expectations for a cyberpunk city, dial all the tech to “plausible” and make sure to check every box established by the sub-genre (including having Tim Bradstreet do some art for you), then you’ll pretty much have Libreville. It is kind of weird having something so early in cyberpunk’s lifespan also be so by the numbers, but there you have it. And that isn’t a bad thing! It is just…an obvious thing. Rotten to the Core is not subtle.

The included adventure may as well be a short story by Billiam Hibson. There’s corporate secrets, dark doings, stolen tech, betrayal, violence, all wrapped in that chrome package. There’s a guy named Steel Cowboy. It’s not high art, but it probably makes a good adventure, honestly — the best RPG adventures tend to be somewhat derivative, right? Where players sort of see the big beats coming. That’s this. And since the cyberpunk aspect in 2300AD is so generic, you can pull it out and run it for anything.

This is 2300AD (1988). Gone is the confusing “Traveller” in the game title. Gone are lots of typos and confusing rules contradictions. Gone are the sample adventures and odd alien pamphlets. In their place is the game GDW probably should have released in the first place — tighter, more polished, more fully realized. Too little, too late — the line had one more year or so of robust support and middling sales before fading into history.

The system, derived from Twilight 2000, is still essentially the same, just, like, tidied up. All 2300 products — Traveller and AD — work fine together. It feels like there is a lot more in the box, though. Of particular note is the information on Aliens.

I’ve been driving myself nuts looking, but this 14-page section seems to be entirely new to this box. The only alien material I see in the original box are pamphlets on the Kafer and the Pentapods and, well, not having this section seems like a glaring oversight. It includes all the information on the six major alien species for the GM’s eyes only, all their secrets that can be discovered in play. Sort of an important part of the game, maybe the central point, is learning this extremely valuable information and it just seems mind-boggling that it wasn’t in the first box at all!

Heh. This is Traveller: 2300 (1986). Despite the name, it has nothing to do with Traveller, the far future science fiction RPG. Rather, 2300 grows out of the then near-future military RPG Twilight 2000. Basically, that game involves small scale nuclear conflicts that take three centuries for humanity to recover from, at which point the tech level has advanced far enough to seriously explore space (and, you know, get into an interstellar war). There is a space elevator and new fangled FTL engines, but the tech is not very much more advanced than what we currently contend with. Earth is still divided into national loyalties that are reflected in an interstellar colonial system. Improbably, France is top dog, though their colonies are in conflict with the alien Kafir. There are other alien species as well — like Star Frontiers and unlike regular Traveller, they mostly seem pleasingly, well, alien.

The system is essentially the same as Twilight 2000. In the ‘80s, people seemed pretty positively disposed toward Twilight. I find that mystifying and I don’t think the focus on detailed realism holds up in the 2020s. I like the world though, I think it is an interesting (if highly militarized) take on what would surely be an exciting period of history to live through. It never really took off with players, though — initially that was probably due to brand confusion but the appetite for this sort of science fiction was eroding in the face of brighter settings like Star Wars and grittier ones like Cyberpunk.

(The posing on that Steve Venters cover always makes me chuckle)