Okay, I got to ask about the timelines.
I only had owned V2.0 and its timeline seemed reasonable to me as a kid of the 80s. That is wall falls, communism is on the wan through out Europe, Germany is reunited. PRC and Soviets go to war. Poland and the Russians restart the Warsaw Pact. Germany accidentally invades Poland due to a helicopter crew misunderstanding where they were during an exchange of gunfire by border guards of Germany and Poland. The Pact goes west to teach the Germans a lesson based on a bad radio call. The Germans plead for help and NATO crumbles as the US/UK/CDN forces go east to help defend Germany, nukes fly and at least in the box set of 2.0 that I had, the only thing about how your players were in Germany was a one blurb on the summer offensive in the year 2000 at the bottom of a page right after the chapter on how to referee, basically this page was how to create a campaign. It wasn't even near the "World of 2000AD" chapter and a major fault in my mind in how V2.0 was setup. This blurb was that German 3rd Army with US 11th Corps and specifically 5th ID Mechanized ran across the last big bits of the Soviet armies in Europe. Now the Germans are in full retreat. The players are on their own if they want to play in Poland. It was maybe half a page of additional background about why the players should be for the European Campaign.
I have gotten V1.0 rules and V2.2 rules in PDF via DTRPG and love the fuller "Escape from Kalisz" module and background in V1.0 of the rules. I read the timeline there and there are major differences between V1 and V2. With of course talk about how East and West Germany conducted operations against the Soviet forces in Germany and then conduct a coup. The details here make better sense as to why NATO crumbles. As well as the interesting details as to how the PACT crumbles under politics. All of this filled in details that didn't jive for me with some of the V1 supplements that made references to the Germans going east, more details of how the combat in Poland went specific to help setup the Poland campaign trilogy of books.
Okay so reading V2.2 it seems that the major difference there is that the Coup against Gorbachev by the hardliners is successful and we see the return of the Warsaw PACT.
Yet most of the folks that I am reading at a facebook page and here seem to have a bad taste for this background. What is the reason for that?
I also have T2013 rule books in my DTRPG collection. I have tried multiple times to read thru that time line and I just either can't stop laughing or going "it doesn't work like that" sort of comments. I had bought it based on the fact that it was there and it seemed when I bought it almost a decade ago, that this was probably going to be the rules going forward.
So all that said, if they are rebooting the timeline, background; which they have to and make this new edition jive with what modules in V1 and V2 have been released. Would it go all the way back to the "Red Dawn" style divide Germany sort of bit? Or would it work better like this
mockumentary from ZDF. Where due to the East German government wanting to go hard line they don't have the wall collapse. Hardliners take over the Soviet Union just after Gorby visits East Germany for the anniversary of the GDR's founding. Just before Hasslehoff is up on the Wall singing for it to come down and it being pulled down. War breaks out because of mistakes by Bush foreign policy team and the Soviets leadership. Where it ends with full on SIOP on everyone. Basically Berlin crisis 1989.
Either the Red Dawn or the Berlin Crisis 1989 background seems to make the most sense to me as being playable timelines and not fully scuttling the background in what is mostly been published before for GDW modules. Which in turn ought to allow for the game to run well until the first series of errata get published and they start to see whether its worthwhile to pump out their own modules going forward.
2nd thought about this planned 4th Gen of T2K, the Merc 2k supplement. My friends and I played the heck out of this rule book and using V2.0 rules for most. We used the same characters we had for the core game but dropping the rads and having them all get out of active duty forming a private military corps that did operations around the world either "
A-Team" sort of adventures or full on using the gazetteer and special ops book to have stuff like what was talked about the old Soldier of Fortune magazines we could find at used books stores near us for cheap.
I wonder how easy it will be to blend Merc 2k with this new planned rule set, since I could see that being a viable alternative time to come out so if folks don't want to do post-apoc. They could do a Great Depression/Great Recession style background with the same sort of characters and being guards to some archeology team in war torn ME and keeping the terrorists off them. Trying to pull off some hostage rescue of vacationers in some south seas island chain that pirates seized their cruise liner. If not something else from the news in the last decade.
Lastly, I cant remember where I read it if it wasn't in the designer notes of V2.0 Twilight 2000 or in the designer notes of 2300AD. That the folks at GDW gamed out WW3 thru to the 2300 time line. Said they used their own in house game rules, which I wonder if they used their own
Third World War series of board games to play out the conflict. I wonder if the new folks would do something similar to game out the land conflict from when the war starts to when we end up on our own to help establish the background.