James Nicoll Reviews

Colin Dunn’s 2021 2300 AD is an expansion of Mongoose Publishing’s current edition of Traveller. It is also the fifth version of the venerable near-future tabletop roleplaying game 2300 AD¹. The 1988 edition was reviewed here. Note that as this is an expansion for Traveller, you will need the Traveller core rules to use this set.

This review is brought by power of affordable bundles of holding and also spite².

The sturdy box, whose cover alerts buyers that the Traveller rules are needed to play 2300, contains three perfect bound books: Book 1: Players and Equipment (104 pages) , Book 2: The Worlds of 2300 (120 pages), Book 3: Vehicles and Spacecraft (112 pages), and finally, a poster-sized Star Chart of Known Space, detailing the star systems frequented by humans and distances of the routes between them.

Negatives:

• Buy-in cost: The PDF version is $50 USD. The box-set (which includes the PDF) is 100 USD. That’s comparable to the price of core rules such as Call of Cthulhu’s… except 2300 is an expansion, not stand alone. One needs the Traveller rules³, so add between $30 USD (PDF) to $60 USD (hardcover book + PDF) to the buy-in. $80 USD to $160 seems a bit much. It suggests that like Chaosium’s Runequest, the target market is nostalgic grognards like me.

• Star maps: Because updating the star maps would have required requiring redrafting the setting almost from scratch, Dunn opted not to do that. Therefore, the stellar date in this is obsolete. As well, there isn’t an analog for the stellar database found in 2300. On that note, you want to take care of that map, as I didn’t see numerical route information elsewhere. Alternatively, bookmark this useful site.

• Art: Much of the art is not to my taste. Which is to say, I prefer my futuristic weapons and equipment to look like they were lifted from the movie Aliens.
• In some cases, boxed games are subject to different import duty regimes than books.

On the plus side, this is a hefty box (although only time will tell if it is as durable as the 1988 box. Ask me again in 2060). There are 336 pages to 2300’s 232 pages (unless you count the necessary Traveller rulebook towards the page total, in which case the current edition has 562 pages). The current box is 1.6 kilograms to the 1988’s edition’s 0.87 kilograms. Additionally, each volume has its own index.

There is enough material here to keep players busy for years. Player characters could die of old age⁴ before exhausting the possibilities. The players could die of old age, as well, without ever necessitating the purchase of additional materials. That said, there are supplements available for purchase. The game is supported, said the former DragonQuest player bitterly. Even if it were not supported, it wouldn’t be that hard for GMs with long-boxes of Cold-War-era 2300 supplements to adapt them.

Star map aside, Dunn has put in a lot of work to upgrade the setting for the 21^st century while preserving the essential elements of the original game. He also provided a bit of future-proofing to protect the game from issues like the failure to materialize the war on which the entire system is predicated. It won’t work because real history is full of bizarre black swans, but at least he tried.

2300 AD is available in various formats from Mongoose Publishing and DriveThru. If I get this posted in time, it is part of an extremely cost-effective Bundle of Holding.

Deets on the books:

Book 1: Players and Equipment (104 pages)

THERE IS AN INDEX.

This details how to adapt the existing Traveller character generation rules to the very different 2300 AD setting. Additionally, there is a list of equipment for player characters to purchase. Both details of the character generation system and the tools available hint strongly at the challenges awaiting Travellers in this universe. Not the firearms, although there are enough to be alarming. The means required to adapt humans to extra-terrestrial conditions suggests that space is not our pal.

Book 2: The Worlds of 2300 (120 pages)

THERE IS AN INDEX.

This provides details on the setting centuries after the vaguely defined Twilight kneecapped human civilization. There is information about Earth, all major planets humans occupy (with their star’s 3d coordinates), and the aliens we have met so far.

2300 was always a bit depressing, what with apparent absence of global conflict-mitigation mechanisms⁵ and the frequency with which technological species destroyed themselves or were conquered by more powerful civilizations. Dunn’s 2300 is even bleaker. Exoplanet colonization in this setting is usually difficult and requires technological adaptations that are arguably dehumanizing. Were that not bad enough, it’s entirely possible that many of the extra-solar colonies are the 24th century equivalents of the Darien scheme.

There are at least two significant ideological divides in this setting: colonists differ on which of the hard path (cybernetic enhancements) or the soft (genetic engineering to suit the conditions of specific worlds) is better. Earth likes its humans baseline and takes a very dim view of biological tweaking of the human form⁶.

Book 3: Vehicles and Spacecraft (112 pages)

THERE IS AN INDEX.

Exactly what you would expect.

As 2300 AD players know, the setting has one bit of super-science, the stutterwarp drive that facilitates interstellar and interplanetary travel. Otherwise, options available lean mundane and conservative in their predictions. No antigravity, no teleportation, no force fields as such. As a consequence, space travel is more expensive and less convenient than in other science fiction tabletop roleplaying games.

Star Chart of Known Space

THERE IS (not) AN INDEX but it’s a poster so why would there be? This is a map of the occupied star systems, with common routes (and their lengths) indicated.

1: I think this is the fifth version. Let’s see, there was Traveller: 2300, then 2300 AD, then 2320, then the first edition of 2300 from Mongoose and now this version. I am 80 percent sure there was never a GURPS version. Well, 70 percent.

2: It turns out if you want to motivate me to finally review something, you can post a review that begins with an angry tirade that there’s a woman on the cover of the box. For the record, women were featured on the cover of Traveller: 2300, 2320, and now this version, and the gender of the person in the powered armor of the cover of the 1988 2300 is anyone’s guess, as are the genders of some of the figures in the first Mongoose edition of 2300.

The images below are of the covers of various editions of 2300, in order of publication.

For that matter, there were women on the covers of the various editions of GDW’s Twilight 2000, to which the original 2300 was a sequel.

3: Game companies with a variety of products sharing core mechanics get to choose how to piss off customers: sell them a supplement that cannot be used without the purchase of the core rules OR include the core rules in each game, effectively making them purchase those rules over and over.

4: I joke! Probably the player characters will perish long before age is an issue. If not from violence, then “Planetary Adaptation Syndrome,” a catch-all term for issues triggered by “pollen, dust from organic sources, star colour, temperature, day and season length, and lighting levels, even the quality and texture of dust and dirt.” Alien worlds are peachy keen until xenopollen gives you anaphylaxis.

5: Although somehow, the various human realms have hammered out agreements to which humans in general adhere.

6:Except for gender reassignment, which appears to be perfectly conventional and hardly worth mentioning. One suspects there are not many buildings named for J. K. Rowling in 2300, if only because almost all records from 1995 until 2070 were lost during Twilight... including the actual nature of Twilight itself.