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Hi everyone,

We're very excited and proud to announce the launch of the Twilight 2000 4th Edition Community Timeline project, Canon Plus!

Canon Plus : An Expanded Look at the World of Twilight 2000 4th Edition is a game supplement available for free (Pay What You Want) over at Drivethrurpg. A team of Referees over at the 4e Discord community have spent more than a year researching, compiling, and expanding information about the 4e setting, in order to provide fans of the game with the opportunity to play in campaign locales beyond just Poland and Sweden. Over 120 pages, we provide realistic timeline narratives for 11 regions around the world where campaign opportunities abound, from the chaos of Nicaragua to the excitement of Thailand to the darkness and disease of the Balkans. These timelines are written to meld seamlessly with each other, with reality (real world history), and with the excellent 4th Edition canon material already produced by Free League. Included are numerous Orders of Battle for the nations in conflict, game maps for use with the new settings, and even some fun campaign seeds for each region.

Most importantly, this is a product created by the fans, for the fans. Our goal was to create a supplement that would help to bring life to other areas of the world during the Twilight War, in order to inspire Referees and players alike, and to hopefully provide a shared resource for content creators to help align future community-generated content through a shared community vision. We hope you enjoy exploring the supplement as much as we enjoyed writing it. Go download a copy today!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/42 ... th-Edition

I wanted to also take a moment to drop some great map resources in this thread as well.

Here's the google map that comes with the free supplement. Feel free to copy it to your own drive - it contains all of the units from Canon Plus along with various points of interest. When paired with the supplement you should have everything you need to start playing campaigns in the written locales.

https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid= ... sp=sharing

Second, here's the world map from the supplement. This map gives a view of what the world looks like in 1997 in terms of national alignment. Who is allied with whom, where lines of diplomacy lay, etc. This is all based upon real world diplomatic history for the time period combined with Free League's canon material.

One should add that the map reflects political machinations that the canon-plus authors figured out to be necessary in order for some aspects of the background to work by their estimation. For example, nowhere in canon does it say that Serbia or Bulgaria are aligned withe the USSR nor, in fact, is there a Sino-Soviet alliance in the official publications of FL. It just seemed much more plausible for the Soviets to juggernaut NATO the way they seemingly did, in case they had hands free in Asia and in fact the Chinese might distract the US - especially the USN - in the Indo-Pacific region to a certain degree.

Also, I'm not sure why on the map most of Africa is colored in light yellow, labeled "Disputed/Strife/Civil War", because that's rather unlikely for some of the countries or is, at best, only true for very small regions of some of these countries. But the map seems to use borders close to what we were used to in 1997: e. g. Montenegro isn't an independent country, but still joined with Serbia (as it was until 2006), South Sudan only became independent in 2011 and East Timor would still be occupied by Indonesia (as it was until 2002).

In total, the publication is a fantastic data mine and campaign supplement for any T2K campaign set around the world of 2000. I highly recommend it!

Thanks Ursus! Good callouts across the board, as usual.

For some additional background on some of the decisions made for anyone interested in this kind of stuff:

In any project of this scope, there are bound to be some errors - we admittedly ran into some misses on the map due to the mapping software available; for example, none of the myriad nations of the Caribbean are displayed on the map (even though arguably more obscure/smaller nations such as Seychelles were).

With that said, yes, most of the map was fairly accurate in terms of national borders for 1997. During the creation process we had to make a decision on whether to use a 1997 map, which would reflect the changes that took place in countries like East and West Germany, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, a map from earlier in the 1990s which would still show the USSR as one nation, or a map from after 1997 which would potentially show even more changes to national borders. Given FL's timeline of when the USSR's economy rebounded, paired with when the Twilight War actually broke out with forces on the ground, 1997 seemed to make the most sense despite the challenges of the software.

As for the alignment of various nations such as those in Africa you mentioned, we read through the diplomatic histories of literally every nation on Earth for the years between ~1960 and 2000 (sometimes much, much earlier and sometimes later depending upon the research material available), and made assessments based upon our own judgment and that of the authors that provided source material used in our research. Surely there's at least a couple listed as "Conflict" when perhaps an "Independent" rating would have been more appropriate, and vice versa, but on the whole we feel it should be fairly accurate given the changes the world would have seen with a revitalized USSR and a Cold War that never ended.

Heffe,

Thanks for this link. It looks very interesting as a supplement so I've bought a copy.

Thanks again.

Mahatatain

Thanks Ursus! Good callouts across the board, as usual.

For some additional background on some of the decisions made for anyone interested in this kind of stuff:

[...]

As for the alignment of various nations such as those in Africa you mentioned, we read through the diplomatic histories of literally every nation on Earth for the years between ~1960 and 2000 (sometimes much, much earlier and sometimes later depending upon the research material available), and made assessments based upon our own judgment and that of the authors that provided source material used in our research. Surely there's at least a couple listed as "Conflict" when perhaps an "Independent" rating would have been more appropriate, and vice versa, but on the whole we feel it should be fairly accurate given the changes the world would have seen with a revitalized USSR and a Cold War that never ended.

Thanks for the explanations, all of which I can understand completely. I figured something like your solution for Africa. Most of the countries had at least some ongoing conflicts. A prolonged, if diminished Cold War detente after 1991 and a resurgent heat-up from 1995 onwards, might very well lead to flare-ups in Africa. So the map makes sense, if one interprets the past of the T2K timeline in that way.