Before anyone thinks I am trying stir up conflict here, keep in mind this is my feelings and those of my GM when we played back in college, on why the events of Kidnapped and Howling Wildnerness did not happen in that campaign. As you have already seen canon took several turns already - but this details why my GM threw those modules in the trash (which I agreed with at the time) for the subsequent events in the timeline. Thus this is not about canon - its about how my timeline differs from canon and why and how it does.
Remember that campaign is where this timeline comes from and how it diverged from canon. Thus this is not an attempt to refute the canon and say we (my GM and those who played in that campaign) are somehow right and the canon is wrong. It is how we approached the canon events of those two modules and decided, as a group, that those events would not be part of our campaign world and thus eventually this timeline.
March 2001 – September 2001
The world wide changes in weather that bring a drought that kills most of the remaining population of the United States of America that is in Kidnapped and Howling Wilderness and mentioned elsewhere does not occur in my timeline as they did not occur in the campaign my GM ran with us in college for the reasons given below.
Reasons:
1) The weather effects as depicted in those two modules completely fail to mention the effect of the El Nino and the Gulf Stream on North American weather. Neither of those two would have been affected by the nuclear strikes on North America. The Gulf Stream in particular has a huge effect on bringing moisture into the eastern part of the United States as well as moderating temperatures, no matter what happens in the continent itself.
2) The drought as depicted would take a much bigger climatic event than the nuclear strikes as depicted in Twilight 2000. To bring on a change of that magnitude would have required almost the entire arsenal of both sides to be used with much bigger mega tonnage, mostly as ground bursts in order to generate the needed dust and debris – in which case most of the world would be dead from radiation effects already. The nuclear powers avoided ground bursts as much as possible from the descriptions given in various source books and modules – and thus the strikes, while numerous, lack the ability to change weather on a global scale.
3) If anything the effect of debris and dust thrown into the air would have produced more rainfall and snowfall, not less. Thus you wouldn’t be looking at drought but increased rainfall, especially in the areas where the nukes hit the hardest.
4) Beyond the scientific reasons, the simple fact is that the uber drought and plagues, as described in Kidnapped, would have destroyed the population of the United States, Canada and Mexico beyond the ability of those nations to be able to rebuild in any time less than multiple centuries.
The mass starvations would have left those still alive totally susceptible to plague and other illnesses to the point that there would have been very few survivors. Thus the whole Twilight 2300 AD timeline, as presented by GDW, cannot occur as it relates to North America, with this drought and plague. And without the US, Mexico, Canada and Texas recovering per that timeline, 2300 AD falls apart as a possible future.
Also as presented in Kidnapped, almost all the areas that show any ability to survive the drought are under the control of New America. CivGov basically has no area left under their control that is survivable and MilGov has Colorado Springs while New America has a lot better situation overall – which is pretty convenient topography indeed. Thus the final defeat of New America becomes a non-event as they would end up being by far the most numerious afterward. And again so much for Twilight 2300 AD.
After much discussion, our GM and the few players who were still interested in the game decided to throw both modules into the trash and we continued, ignoring the drought and any reference to it in the modules we used, until the group finally broke up after college.
Thus, while there will be local droughts and plague events in 2001 AD in my timeline, there will be no massive drought and destruction of the remaining population of the United States per what we discussed. As I have seen on this forum, that position is a very common one among its members, though not in any way universal. Kidnapped and Howling Wilderness thus will not make any kind of appearance in the Olefin timeline – to me and my GM when we played, they are as much apocrypha as City of Angels is or as realistic as the scenarios in Twilight Nightmares.
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