Quote:
Originally Posted by Ursus Maior
From a company's point of view, putting out a small document that just gives facts and dates is probably the worst decision one could make. There is literally zero chance that anyone would like the content 100 % and recommend it. It's just fluff with no stats and game stuff and it is something no referee will use as is. The timeline given was already met with so much vitriol, it just shows this would be a colossal waste of time and money for FL.
Plus, most groups will use Poland and Sweden as their setting. Other countries in far off places hardly influence what happens there. And for Europe you get the basic facts: WW3, nukes, Soviets fighting NATO and former WP countries. Stalemate. Operation Reset. NATO fails liberating Eastern Europe. Post-collapse. Go!
Look at it this way: If you'd picked up the game in '84, what did you get?
1995: China fights USSR. The USSR gets supported by WP states, because everyone's a good commie.
1996: West Germany starts WW3 while annexing East Germany while the NVA just watches. WP declares war on Germany, except for Romania, who find an ally in Yugoslavia. NATO comes to Germany's rescue, since NATO is now in business of wars of aggression; except France, Belgium, Italy, and Greece, because people speaking non-Germanic languages are apparently the only ones with a clear head.
1997: Greek and Turkey finally go to war. Italy violates Austrian neutrality, because backstabbing lunatics is now everyone's game. Meanwhile, Germany actually wins against the USSR, so they Commies go nuclear. Everyone joins into that game.
1998: France and Belgium start shooting refugees. Since everybody has been at it for 2 1/2 years already, divisions are now down to 50 %. Apparently, Germany could levy new combat effective divisions still by 1945, after 5 years of war, but by 2000 suddenly they forgot that every male above the age of 18 has had either training as a soldier or in civil defense, police, firefighting or healthcare. Italy is really successful as is Greece. The US break de facto apart over a refugee crisis. Mexico invades the US. Yugoslavia invades Hungary, despite Italy having occupied Croatia, Slovenia and Serbia, while Greece annexed Macedonia. Unclear what's left of Yugoslavia by that point except Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegowina.
1999: The US break apart even further. Europe stabilizes, because everyone's dead.
2000: Thinking that stability is bullshit, NATO wants to go for another round, fails miserably over getting its hands on a "turn back time" MacGuffin and now is worse off than ever before.
Meanwhile, I'm adopting stuff from 1E and 2E for my campaign, but boy am I glad FL isn't putting out anything like these 6 pages from 1984.
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You actually get a lot more than that - which is what Chico is showing with his day to day breakdown that he is posting. It gives you exactly what is needed to know what is going on elsewhere enough that a GM could have taken that information and played the game elsewhere with at least some confidence that he or she was following canon. And they have quite a while to come up with a basic timeline - and two major reference works that detailed out the whole world in the V1 and V2.2 sourcebooks as well as things like the RDF, Howling Wilderness, East Africa and the Korean book that they could have used to come up with how the events in Europe affect the world.
So you dont have to start from scratch - you can go thru and easily do a nice concise timeline that shows what is going on elsewhere. Plus that is called knowing your base and your target market
Those timelines and details mattered a lot to the core T2K market - thus you make a point of it to get that right in your release. As for them being a small company - so what??? They were offered and turned down multiple offers by people to assist them in the launch - heck coming up with a plausible timeline is part of what both Raellus and I had to do with our stuff - and Frank is working with them and could have easily assisted them.
And the timeline they did come up with for events in Europe really needed help - if you have issues with V1 at the least they didnt send over 500,000 reinforcements and then suddenly forget they sent them over like FL did in their timeline.
So again - basically if you only want to play a limited campaign in Central Poland and Sweden then who cares about timelines. But if your players are like "this is getting boring what about the rest of the world" then you are going to have a major issue with basically the rest of the world barely being mentioned.