Scandinavia during T2K?

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Well to be fair, Australia does "win" and not just in a small way.
Keeping in mind that T2k was developed from "The Great Game"** and is part of the history of the 2300AD universe, Australia is a significant power in that game. So yeah, after the Twilight War, Australia does have a win and takes New Zealand (and most of Oceania) along for the ride.


** The history of the creation of Twilight:2000 - apologies for the repetition to all those who already know all this...

The Great Game was a political-economic-military simulation done to create the history for the 2300AD game and it involved a third World War at the beginning of a 300 year period that ends with the year (surprise, surprise), 2300.
This war was known in-house as the Twilight War because it wrecked the world enough to allow certain changes to the political/national entities on Earth thus the original entities declined and then new ones grew to take their place. It was the "twilight" of the old world.

The lead people behind T2k were returning from a convention when during the trip back home, they came up with the notion of a modern military RPG but it needed to be free of the command structures of real world militaries so that it would be fun to game. As they developed the idea, it was decided that the best setting was a devastating world war which coincidentally was exactly what they had happen in the game history of 2300AD. So although chronologically, T2k occurs before 2300AD, the games were created in the reverse order.

In this way, they developed the background for Twilight: 2000 1st Edition - later editions have their backgrounds altered to fit more with the real world of the late 1980s-early 1990s. A lot of the background to the Twilight War is the result of the GDW members playing out the war as part of The Great Game. Some people have claimed that various aspects such as Italy leaving NATO and later attacking Germany are stupid and unrealistic - these things happened in the The Great Game and in some cases were a result of the various personalities (who controlled the different nations) competing amongst each other.
Other things were changed to make them more "gamey", e.g. the wholesale ruin of North America was implemented not just because of what happened in The Great Game, but also to allow the AD&D style adventures found in the European scenarios to continue when the PCs got back to the USA.

Being a bit of an arse about it, I find it amusing that some people who dabbled in T2k claim that various parts of it's background are unrealistic when I know that the background was imported wholesale from the end result of the Twilight War played out in The Great Game. These same people don't seem to have a problem if they play a WW2 wargame and have Germany win (or some smaller nation like Lithuania carves a new empire for itself free of the USSR etc. etc.) That's what the Twilight War was, a wargame played out amongst the GDW staff and the end result was used as the history for Twilight: 2000 (1st edition).

The wiki entry for 2300AD gives some clearer details (compared to my rambling monologue!) to its creation http://wiki.travellerrpg.com/2300_AD