Introduction

I've decided to start this blog to make more public my development of a system (Leclerc) and world (Bayard) for a 2300AD campaign I hope to begin in February of 2020. I will continue to develop the world as the players engage, etc.

I want this separate this from my referee-less Traveller blog because, well, I didn't want to mix the two.

If you haven't heard of 2300AD, it is an RPG developed by GDW (the company that owned Traveller) and published in 1986. 2300AD is a continuation of the events captured in another of their RPGs, titled Twilight 2000, which is a game taking place in a post-apocalyptic world after a sizable, but limited nuclear war (this is called the Twilight War in the Mongoose 2300AD sourcebook). Eventually the world recovers and humanity spreads out into nearby star systems after the development of the stutterwarp drive, which requires a return to a gravity well at least every 7.7 light years traveled to shed accumulated radiation. This has resulted in interstellar lanes around the nearby stars in Earth's vicinity.

Nations still dominate humanity. The Fourth French Empire (recently declared) is the major power, though you have significant powers in the United States (sans Texas), Manchuria, Azania, Britain, Argentina, Australia, Germany, and others. (FYI, the status of the world powers were determined by an in-house GDW strategy game called, The Game, which played out the events from the end of the Twilight War to 2300.)

2300AD positions itself as a hard sci-fi RPG (with the exception of the stutterwarp drive), which I think it by and large succeeds at (though I imagine some particularly adept hard sci-fi folks will cringe at my interpretation of hard sci-fi at the game table--I won't be completely fantastical or anything, but I suspect I'll get math wrong, extrapolate non-possibilities, etc.).

Mongoose released a sourcebook for 2300AD based on its Traveller 1E ruleset (a version for the 2E ruleset is in the works). My intention is to run my campaign against the 2E ruleset and specifically to use a number of the rules from the Traveller Companion to supplement my campaign, along with probably some home rules--but more on that later.

I'll start posting more about the background of the Leclerc system, the campaign, etc., in the coming days and weeks. Thanks for reading!


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Very Brief History of the Leclerc System

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