by RockyMountainNavy, 13 June 2024
In my early June 2024 article “Pop nukes in Twilight: 2000 ~ Surviving Nuclear War Amongst Conspiracies” (found right here on Armchair Dragoons), I discussed associations between popular culture, nuclear war, and the history of the roleplaying games Twilight: 2000 (GDW, 1984) and Twilight: 2000 4th Edition (Free League Publishing, 2021). Little did I know this is a trigger issue for some who have, shall we say, a less-than-favorable view of the “history” of Twilight: 2000 4th Edition (T2K4e).
Not that I am trying to add kindling to an internet flame war, but I recently took in another T2K4e product that directly relates to the timeline. Canon Plus: An Expanded Look at the World of Twilight 2000 4th Edition is a digital sourcebook published via Free League Workshop community content for the roleplaying game (RPG) Twilight: 2000 4th Edition. As community content and not an “official” product of Free League Publishing, the contents of Canon Plus are, well, not canon. As a Workshop product, it is in effect a “sanctioned” yet non-canon supplement. Canon Plus lead author Jeffrey Lewis writes in the introduction how their content is related to Free League’s T2K4e canon:
While Free League has provided Referees and players with a solid base of canon information from which to work in the official Twilight 2000 4e Referee’s Manual, members of the community have regularly been faced with the following question – “What happened elsewhere in the world of Twilight 2000?” This book seeks to answer that question from a strategic level, in order to provide aspiring Referees with realistic inspiration, while still preserving the integrity of Free League’s excellent source material.1
“…strategic level….realistic inspiration…” The goal of Canon Plus is certainly lofty. The problem is that the results delivered in Canon Plus are problematic—canon or not.
If you are like Navaronegun and pre-disposed against the setting history of T2K4e, the words of Lewis later in the introduction to Canon Plus will very likely not change your opinion:
Please note that entries in this book were written by various members of the Twilight 2000 4th Edition Discord Community. We recognize that it is not perfect, and that your world of Twilight 2000 may differ from that of the contents herein. That’s perfectly fine, and we encourage every player and Referee to make the world of Twilight 2000 their own. This book is the result of our collective vision of the universe, based upon our own expertise, our research, and our opinions about how the events described in the Referee’s Manual would have shaped the rest of the world.2
So how do you write an alternate history? Lewis and their co-authors provide the broadest of brushstrokes of their T2K4e worldview of the setting in Canon Plus:
The story of the Twilight 2000 world throughout the 1990s is one of a Cold War that never ended. It’s a story of the major world powers continuing to use their political power and the strength of their arms to influence nations well beyond the reach of their own borders. The Americans and Soviets continued working hard at funding extremists throughout the world to destabilize alliances with one another while reinforcing their own influence, but they weren’t the only ones. France invested heavily in Africa and South America. China peddled what influence it could in Africa and southeast Asia, looking to control the waters around vital shipping routes and encouraging nations to embrace their particular brand of communist rule.3
While recognizing (and faintly praising) the difficulty GDW faced predicting the future, Lewis and team turn to Free League’s canon timeline though the lens of hindsight:
First, the 4e timeline adheres more closely to reality than the older timelines. This is natural of course, because hindsight is always 20/20. The original creators at GDW were taking stabs in the dark when it came to what might happen throughout the ‘90s. To their credit, they did a great job! But not all of their visions came to pass, and now we have the benefit of actually having lived through the 90s to help better inform our understanding of the era.4
Next, Lewis and team talk about how they came to develop the orders of battle for Canon Plus:
The older editions were going off of publicly available information in terms of units that might be in theater. Again, to their credit, GDW did mighty fine work given the circumstances. But that was in the days before the internet, and information about the actual Soviet military was much more limited than what’s available today. So we started documenting all of the various units in the Twilight War. Where were they in the previous editions? What units were actually available in that time period? We quickly came to the realization that the Soviet military of the 80s and 90s was far larger than any of us realized. We also realized that NATO, when combined with the rest of the world, would have ultimately beaten Russia quite handily.5
[OSINT Interlude]
[Open source intelligence, or OSINT, writers of the 1980’s and 1990’s were remarkably good at what they did. Bill Sweetman in Smithsonian Magazine tells how they used a simple calculator to estimate the fuel capacity of the Soviet TU-22M Backfire bomber that the USAF insisted had intercontinental range:
“Then there was the Tupolev Tu-22M Backfire bomber. Everyone thought it was equivalent to the U.S. Air Force’s Rockwell B-1, and had a similar range. But based on the fuzzy photos at hand, the graph paper and the Cambridge [calculator] disagreed. The Backfire had room for only about 50 tons of fuel, about two-thirds what everyone thought.”
“Or nearly everyone. Not long after we published our numbers, I got a call from a puzzled engineer at McDonnell Douglas, who wondered how we had hit the same numbers his team had. I told him about my calculator.”
“In 1992, the Russians brought the Tu-22M to the Farnborough International Air Show, along with a one-page handout. We’d hit the fuel capacity within five percent. Later, I found out why that McDonnell Douglas guy was so surprised: His team had been working for what he preferred to call the Culinary Institute of America, which was quarreling with the Air Force. The Air Force claimed the Backfire had intercontinental range; the CIA said it could make it with inflight refueling but could never get back.”
“U.S. Air Force intelligence boss Major General George Keegan threatened to mess with the F-15 program—a huge McDonnell Douglas contract—if MD’s analysts, the ones feeding the CIA, didn’t find more fuel tanks in the Russian bomber so that their conclusions matched his. CEO Sanford “Sandy” McDonnell stood his ground. Keegan went on to start the Great Space Laser Panic of ’79. And the Tu-22M did what it did best, which wasn’t strategic bombing but scaring the bejeesus out of carrier groups.” (Smithsonian Magazine, December 2015)]
It is not only the Canon Plus “correlation of forces” [Did Lewis and team encounter the concept as part of their research?] they discuss but also the broad trajectory of nations:
The nations of the world – our next task was understanding which side of the conflict various countries would take. To do so, we spent roughly six months reading encyclopedia and wiki entries on nearly every country on the planet, in order to understand their diplomatic relations from the ‘50’s to 2000, and how those relations may have changed given FL’s timeline. Some items that were interesting to note – While the USSR stayed together past ’91, it didn’t really have excess funds to help arm, influence or supply other nations until around ’94 at the earliest. This is why most changes that happened in real life, such as Yugoslavia breaking apart in ’92, still happened in this module. As a result, when reading the national narratives in this book, most timelines up until ’94 are actually true to real life. It’s only at that point that timelines begin to split into the fictional setting (with a few exceptions of course). 6
I’ve got the whole world in my hands…
Canon Plus comes with two maps. The first World Allegiance Map is described this way:
The World Allegiance Map is intended to give players and Referees a bird’s eye view of how the world shaped out in the year 1997, given the successful coup and the resurgence of the Soviet Union starting around 1994 and its resultant impact on the rest of the world. In short, this map should provide an idea of which nations sided with which world superpowers, etc. Please note that just because two nations may be aligned, that doesn’t mean that they necessarily provided troops or material support in times of war, just simply that this is an approximation of the political landscape appearing at the start of the Third World War. Some other items to keep in mind:
- While months of pain-staking research went into the creation of this map, we’re only human. If you feel that we recorded a country’s allegiance incorrectly, please feel free to make adjustments in your own game as you see fit. And please tell us about it so that we can consider making corrections!
- The mapping application we used unfortunately couldn’t support every single country. Please feel free to assign minor countries, such as the multitude nations of the Caribbean, allegiances on an as needed basis.7
Befitting a modern digital media product, Canon Plus includes not only a pdf booklet but also a link to a second customized Google Maps overlay:
The second map included with this module is the customized Google Map. The Google Map is intended as a referee resource, and displays the locations of major units and possible scenario objectives across the globe in key conflict areas in alignment with this module. 8
The heart of Canon Plus is not the maps but the country narratives…all 11 of them. As Lewis and team comment in the Designer’s Notes:
The national narratives contained in this book are our best approximation of what we think may have happened. Enterprising readers will have noted that we generally selected a nation from each continent or region. This was intentional. We did our best to spread out our chosen nations in order to provide the broadest understanding possible of what was happening throughout the world. While we didn’t choose many nations that we wanted to, such as the US itself, we’ve been assured that FL has plans to detail these locales in their future modules. Instead, we tried to choose nations that we felt would provide for interesting settings for Refs and players to explore.9
For the record, the 11 national narratives in Canon Plus are China, Angola, Australia, Estonia, India, Nicaragua, North Korea, Serbia and the Balkans, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela.
Expertise, research, and opinions, oh my!
“This book is the result of our collective vision of the universe, based upon our own expertise, our research, and our opinions…” In Canon Plus I see a combination of shallow expertise and limited research leading to opinions that can, and should, be challenged. I don’t know if Lewis and team used anything approximating structured analytic techniques—I doubt it—but the Designer’s Notes for Canon Plus offer some insight into their timeline development process. While I admire and on some levels respect Lewis and their team for writing Canon Plus the writing team views as achievements are, in my opinion, reflections of the shallow expertise they lay claim to.
“Again, to their credit, GDW did mighty fine work given the circumstances. But that was in the days before the internet, and information about the actual Soviet military was much more limited than what’s available today.” Books. Before the internet the world used books. In the 1980’s and 1990’s one also read professional and trade journals, like The Proceedings of the Naval Institute or Aviation Week & Space Technology (affectionally known by early OSINT’ers as Aviation LEAK & Space Technology). Further, I believe that Frank Chadwick and the co-designers of the GDW version of T2K almost certainly read the publicly available U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency Soviet Military Power reports which at that time were the largest tranches of declassified intelligence reporting ever released to the public. Further, I assert it is virtually certain Chadwick and team read books (not encyclopedias or wikis!) including those from fellow wargaming personalities like David Isby and John Prados who were well known for both their writings on the Soviet military and wargame designs. These sources, and many other like them, provided a deep understanding of the Soviet threat from analysts across the political spectrum; be it DIA publicly releasing intelligence in support of the Reagan Administration, David Isby combing through U.S. and Soviet sources, or John Prados assessing the public intelligence record with an eye towards Soviet subterfuge.
The information publicly available was far from limited; one just had to know how to look for it. Tom Clancy, in the days before the internet, was one of the better writers utilizing OSINT. As Benjamin Griffith relates in Reagan’s War Stories: A Cold War Presidency:
The author [Clancy] did strive for technical realism, though, and was justifiably proud of the handling of detail in his books. As part of the prepublication process, the Naval Institute Press submitted the manuscript of The Hunt for Red October to two active-duty submariners. The first cleared the book; the other declared it unpublishable because it contained classified information but withdrew the objection when Clancy detailed the publicly available sources he used.10
There were also contemporary sources available that opposed the popular opinion (and Reagan Administration line) like The Myth of Soviet Military Supremacy by Tom Gervasi in 1986. Though arguing an opposite viewpoint from the White House, the data presented in this tome of over 500 pages is incredibly valuable to a historical researcher. Again, I would argue that Chadwick and team were likely to have read books like Gervasi’s. My question is: Did Lewis and their team do the same?
“We quickly came to the realization that the Soviet military of the 80s and 90s was far larger than any of us realized.” The implication of that statement is that not only did Lewis and their team not realize the size of Soviet forces, but neither did the original T2K writers or the canon authors in T2K4e either. While the portion of the Soviet armed forces found in GDW’s T2K or Free Leagues T2K4e may not be all-encompassing, that “realization” was very likely well known, at the very least, to original T2K authors Frank Chadwick, Loren Wiseman, Bill Keith, and Andrew Keith. The original T2K authors hailed from Game Designers’ Workshop, a publisher of wargames. Wargames that some consider so detailed that, they argue, they should be called conflict simulations instead. GDW was arguably a wargame publishing powerhouse. As the Player’s Guide to Twilight: 2000 (version 1.0) from Far Future Enterprises noted in 2006:
Game Designers’ Workshop began to make a name for itself in modern military war games with the introduction, in 1983, of its Assault tactical war-game series (consisting of Assault, Boots & Saddles, Chieftain, and Reinforcements). Assault dealt with the capabilities of small units and individual armored vehicles in the modern (World War III) military environment. Close on its heels (early 1984) came the Third World War strategic war-game series (consisting of Third World War, Arctic Front, Southern Front, and Persian Gulf), laying out all of Europe in consistent scale maps in four different games. Third World War dealt with the strategic operations of military units in a hypothetical, but genuinely possible, World War III. 11
There is no really polite way of saying this but to announce that the “realization” of the size of the Soviet threat is a modern discovery is, in reality, an admission of one’s own limited reading of history.
(ed note: this is far, far more polite that I probably would have said it!)
“We also realized that NATO, when combined with the rest of the world, would have ultimately beaten Russia quite handily.” Really? I certainly hope so, but from the perspective of the day the answer to that question was very much in doubt. So doubtful in fact that military officers in NATO brought their concerns to the public like General Sir John Hackett did in their book The Third World War: August 1985 (1978) and the follow-on The Third World War: The Untold Story (1983). As Hackett writes in the Author’s Notes and Acknowledgments to Untold Story:
Those who argue for the reduction of defence expenditure in the countries of the West not only seem to live in a land of total make-believe, but they refuse to give the Marxist- Leninists who govern the USSR any credit either for meaning what they say (and have been saying for a long time) or for knowing what they are doing. What they have been saying, and have not ceased to say, is that the capitalist countries of the West are doomed to go down before the inexorable advance of communism, with the Red Army playing a major part in their overthrow. What they have been doing is building up huge armed forces, far greater than what would be necessary, in any conceivable situation, for their own defence, at a cost gravely detrimental to domestic development in the USSR and in a mode essentially offensive.
We have been encouraged by signs around us that among the peoples of the West the point, on the strength of such indications, is beginning to be taken. We have outlined a possible course that improvement to the defences of the West might take, in full awareness that it might take others. We have assumed that enough is done to ensure that, when the Soviet machine travels of its own momentum along a path of miscalculation and mischance towards an attack on NATO, the West, at some cost, is able to survive. It is possible, of course, that enough will not be done. The outcome is then likely to be different. This is not to suggest that a war is bound to happen, or even that it is likely. If, however, there could be no question that, in the event of war, the Warsaw Pact would win, the free countries of the West would be in no position to withstand political pressure from the USSR, which would enjoy the fruits of a military victory without having to fight for it.12
Further, I would argue that one of the reasons the “Cold War Gone Hot” genre of wargaming is popular today is that the answer to the victor question is still very much in doubt. The popularity of games like Twilight Struggle: The Cold War, 1945-1989 (the number two all-time bestselling title from GMT Games) or Quartermaster General: The Cold War (PSC Games, 2018) is not only because they are fun games to play but because they also allow players to explore a bit of what-if history and see if they can do it differently.
Even within the niche of wargaming the popularity of Cold War games like Bruce Maxwell’s NATO: The Cold War Goes Hot – Designer Signature Edition (Compass Games, 2021) which reimplemented their original NATO: The Next War in Europe (Victory Games, 1983)—that very likely was played by the GDW team—are teetering battles not just for play balance reasons.
I recognize that T2K4e was published the year before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but reading statements like, “NATO…would have…beaten Russia quite handily” goes a long way towards explaining the misunderstanding of the Russian military threat and consequent political biases displayed by so many (particularly in European NATO countries) in the lead up to the Russian invasion in February 2022. Perhaps if they had tried wargaming it out…
“…we spent roughly six months reading encyclopedia and wiki entries…” With the benefit of hindsight, sources written around and after T2K4e’s point of divergence (POD) are valuable sources for writing “what-if” scenarios. A part of me always wanted to use “Part III: The Scenarios – Stories of the Future” from Russia 2010 (1993) or the worst case scenario in the chapter “The Future is Ours, Comrades!” from The New Military in Russia (1996) as starting points for a new T2K setting. Indeed, if the Canon Plus team indeed stayed “true” up to 1994 like they claim then sources like these could serve as the point of divergence for the setting.
Given Canon Plus is not a research paper and not footnoted we will never know what sources Lewis and their team ultimately drew upon. If they used an approach like Free League for the canon T2K4e setting then the output is questionable. Recall Navaronegun’s comment:
My problem is that Free League, with the benefit of 24 years of hindsight for the setting, managed to do almost no fact checking or hire any political/military consultants who knew what they were talking about, to the point of having organizations that *currently exist in 2020* (the date of publication) that COULDN’T have existed in 1998-2000.
If Free League does not “get it right” like Navaronegun points out I have my doubts Lewis and team did either.
Canon Plus or Minus?
“So Rocky,” you ask, “Should I or shouldn’t I buy Canon Plus?” My recommendation will depend on what type of T2K Referee you are. If you have no interest in doing your own world-building and are the type who can “go with the flow” and ignore contradictions in alternate-history settings then go ahead and make the purchase. If you, alternatively, are one that is confident in defining the history of your gaming world (or parts of it relevant to your campaign) then Canon Plus is an easy pass.
In some ways I am a bit surprised that Free League didn’t take inspiration from another GDW RPG, Traveller: 2300 aka 2300AD and execute their own version of The Game to develop the background. As the Traveller: 2300 Referee’s Manual explains:
The background history for Traveller: 2300 was developed over the course of 1985-86 using a grand social-political-economic-military-diplomatic simulation known fondly here as The Game. The future course of history depended not on just one person’s ideas as of what the future would be like, but on the interaction of many people’s ideas — the ones that survived were the ones that withstood the conflict and diplomacy of The Game. Beginning with the conduct of World War III, players manipulated their nations on five or ten year turns to bring them into the future of 2300.
Compare the Canon Plus world map…
…with The Game world map. Maybe what T2K really needs is a serious wargame…
…minus the cat pee, of course.
Books and Games Referenced
- Brody, I. (2018) Quartermaster General: The Cold War. PSC Games.
- Chadwick, F. and Frank Astell, Andrew Keith, Bill Keith, Loren Wiseman. (1984) Twilight: 2000 (1st Edition). Game Designers’ Workshop.
- Game Designers’ Workshop. (1988) The Game: Origins of 2300AD. Game Designers’ Workshop.
- Gervasi, T. (1986) The Myth of Soviet Military Supremacy. Harper & Row.
- Griffith, B. (2022) Reagan’s War Stories: A Cold War Presidency. Naval Institute Press.
- Gupta, A. and Jason Matthews. (2005) Twilight Struggle: The Cold War, 1945-1989. GMT Games.
- Hackett, General Sir John and others. (1979) The Third World War: August 1985. Macmillan Publishing.
- Hackett, General Sir John (1983) The Third World War: The Untold Story. Bantam Books.
- Härenstam, T. and others. (2021) Twilight: 2000 (4th Edition). Free League Publishing
- Isby, D. (1981) Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army. Jane’s Publishing Company Ltd.
- Lewis, J. (2024) Canon Plus: An Expanded Look at the World of Twilight 2000 4th Edition. Free League Workshop.
- Maxwell, B. (2021) NATO: The Cold War Goes Hot, Designer Signature Edition. Compass Games.
- Maxwell, B. (1993) NATO: The Next War in Europe. Victory Games.
- Prados, J. (1982) The Soviet Estimate: U.S. Intelligence Analysis and Russian Military Strength. The Dial Press.
- Starr, R. (1996) The New Military In Russia: Ten Myths That Shape the Image. Naval Institute Press.
- Yergin, D. and Thane Gustafson. (1993) Russia 2010 and What It Means for the World. Vintage Books.
Feature image taken from Canon Plus cover.
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I’m good man. Methinks I will not be buying that product. Wikis and Encyclopedias indeed. What was their “expertise?” Anyway, my solution is fantastic for my purposes. FL means nothing to me. I wish them well with President North…I mean West and their meanderings. Obviously what happened is that there was a time machine sent back to 1998 to create organizations that weren’t even a thought until 2017 (I know, I had to drudge through the meetings).
Take care, Rocky.
I’m mostly in navaronegun’s camp and yours: the T2k4 background was poorly executed. I was part of the forum outrage in 2020-21, before withdrawing from the field. There were a lot of sources that GDW used that can be seen, checked, and played; I haven’t seen anything like from FL.
I was one of the voices early on in the T2K4 development that the world building they were doing made no sense – from how an American nuclear carrier would have never been deployed where they deployed it to how the US got 500,000 reinforcements ready to go (mostly light infantry) and deployed to Europe and then they suddenly all disappeared with no explanation as to what happened to them. They wrote a game that was badly researched and badly written and very EuroCentric – and that was written mostly by Russo-philes who also had a political agenda as well. And what I got for my trouble trying to make the game more believeable and better researched was to get ignored and then pushed aside.
FL should have done their job right the first time and actually did some world building to have the fans build on instead of giving us the mess they gave us with T2K4. GDW’s releases gave us a world that might have been flawed but was complete enough to build on (especially with the V2.2 details on the rest of the world). FL didnt and the Canon Plus, while a good effort, is not what we needed.