Merc 2000

[Southernap]

Okay so this brain drop comes from some discussion on the Discord channel and some emails with a couple of friends who were big into T2k.

The bastard child of the system is Merc 2k. It wasn't really given a chance to blossom as an alternative to the bleakness of T2K.

Here are the books that were published for it and note it was designed to work with V2.0 and V2.2 rules. Not sure how easy it would have been to convert to V1.0 rules of the core T2k.

• Merc 2000 - The rule book This is the book you need to run a non-nuclear war campaign. Where you can be "The Wild Geese", "The A-Team", "The Professionals", "The Dogs of War", etc.
• Special Operations - You want to add some SWAT, CIA, KGB, DEA, MOSSAD, etc as either NPCs or as potential threats. This supplement gives you the chance.
  
• Merc 2000 Gazetteer - This was a small supplement that gave you a bunch of different and interesting places to run a campaign based on some both real world potentials and future threats. Such as fighting in Africa, battling drug lords in SE Asia, helping against a popular uprising in the Philippines.
  
• Operation Crouching Dragon - So this was a full module from setup to get away. All about oil and corporate espionage.
  
• Bangkok Cesspool of the Orient - So this one might or might not cause some debate. I think this is a Merc 2000 source book and not a T2K source book. The reason is this quote from the opening introduction of the book:
  
  

  GETTING THERE The setting of Bangkok is so far from the previous series of Twilight: 2000 modules that it is almost not worth the effort to try to explain in any depth how the characters got there. Players who wish strict continuity to be maintained may work outwith their referee some means by which they have arrived in Bangkok: perhaps they arrived as a result of the Last Sub- marine trilogy of adventures, perhaps by the sailing ship described in Spanish Main, perhaps as a result of some mission gone awry. Players might wish to generate characters from the US 2nd Infantry Division, stationed in Cam Ranh Bay at the start of the war and now seeking their fortunes in Bangkok

  Almost like GDW knew this was going to be hard to segue into most of the other modules or adventures published. It was also an attempt to generate as the introduction mentions, a whole new type of source book for T2k. Yet, the book feels more in its writing to fit better in the Merc 2000 world.
  
• Nautical/Aviation Handbook - This provides a number of planes and small boats for the players to use. Again, the book has a number of planes and some ships that would be out of sorts as being flying even in the RDF adventures. So there appears to me that this is themed more to being a Merc 2000 book and should have been classified as such.

So with all that said, my question for debate on the floor is this:
Was it a good addition to the rules as we had them? Did it provide something for players to get their fix of the game engine without having to deal with nuclear weapons and still not be under the thumb of military leadership. Or was it a complete waste of time and effort by GDW?

My own personal view since I had it, Special Ops addition, Bangkok, and the Gazetteer; is that it was a fun and different challenge for us when I played the game as a teenager. If we wanted to do some A-team like adventures or some Mack Bolan/Stony Man cheese adventure novels it worked great. We use to break it out and either do a quick one shot or even a mini-campaign when our GM or even us players hit a wall in our current T2K campaign.

Question 2: So does this deserve a reboot sometime or even a fan made new source book taking in the modern era of the post 2001 environment and entities like Blackwater, Aegis Defense Services, or Paladin Group?