Retrospective: Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook

As a big fan of Twilight: 2000, one of the most intriguing aspects of its sequel game, 2300AD (né Traveller: 2300), was discovering what had become of Earth's many nations by the dawn of the 24th century. While the game's boxed sets and numerous supplements offered occasional hints, much remained unknown. GDW hadn't yet published a map of the world, leaving me to wonder not only how borders had shifted after the Twilight War but also which new nations had risen in its aftermath. In hindsight, this omission made a certain amount of sense: 2300AD focused primarily on Earth's interstellar colonies, relegating the homeworld to a supporting role. Still, I was eager to learn more, but it wasn't until the release of the Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook in 1989 that I finally got the map I’d long wanted, along with a wealth of additional detail about the planet.

By the time this supplement (penned by Lester Smith) appeared, science fiction and, by extension, science fiction gaming, was undergoing a thematic and aesthetic shift. The broad, idealistic strokes of earlier speculative futurism were giving way to bleaker visions of tomorrow, marked by corporate dystopias, body augmentation, and a cynical erosion of privacy and individuality. R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk, released the year before, had embraced this new direction wholeheartedly, quickly establishing itself as the definitive expression of the genre within the hobby. In contrast, the Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook struck me as more ambivalent about the second part of its title. Its treatment of cybernetics felt less like a serious commitment to the cyberpunk mode and more like a cursory nod to a rising trend – an instance of bandwagon-jumping rather than wholehearted adoption.

I was much more interested in its depiction of 24th century Earth than in its presentation of cybertechnology anyway. I hoped that, by turning its attention away from the stars and toward the cradle of mankind, this supplement might help to expand the scope of the game and enrich the backdrop against which its action unfolded. In some respects, it’s reasonably successful. The book spends most of its 96 pages offering a portrait of the planet three hundred years after World War III, presenting a patchwork of familiar and unfamiliar nations and evolving political dynamics. Looking back on it now, what’s most notable about the Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook is how thoroughly it reflects the broader ambitions – and limitations – of 2300AD as a whole.

To explain what I mean, please allow me to briefly discuss 2300AD and its premise within the larger context of GDW’s roleplaying game lines in the late '80s. 2300AD was an attempt to create a hard science fiction RPG distinct from its more space opera-tinged predecessor, Traveller. The game imagined a world rebuilt from the ashes of the Twilight War under the leadership of the French Empire and its European allies, with interstellar colonization achieved through faster-than-light “stutterwarp” drives. The game’s tone was thus one of plausible extrapolation: technology had indeed advanced, but not in ways that made the world unrecognizable. It was a future you could almost believe in – grounded, methodical, and informed by history, geopolitics, and military realism.

The Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook tries to remain true to that tone, but it haphazardly incorporates the trappings of cyberpunk in a way that, unfortunately, undermines the attempt. Cybernetic implants, shadowy megacorporations, and “deck jockeys” are all present, but they’re awkwardly grafted onto a setting that was never designed to accommodate them. Rather than enriching the game’s vision of the future, these elements often feel like genre paint hastily slathered over a very different kind of foundation. The result is a setting that feels inconsistent, even incoherent at times, a supplement trying to gesture toward contemporary trends in science fiction without fully integrating them into 2300AD’s established ethos.

This tension between competing visions of the future is, I think, emblematic of the struggles GDW often faced when expanding its game lines. The company’s writers were admirably ambitious and often ahead of the curve in terms of scope and complexity, but they sometimes failed to reconcile newer creative impulses with the foundations they had already laid. We see this in the tonal shifts and mechanical overhauls of MegaTraveller and especially in the jarring transition to Traveller: The New Era. However, it occurred even earlier in the Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook. Here, though, the misstep feels especially unfortunate, because the supplement had the potential to deepen and expand the game’s portrayal of Earth and bring a neglected part of its setting into sharper focus. Instead, it mostly muddies the waters by attempting to be something 2300AD was never intended to be.

That’s not to say the supplement is without value. For those interested in 2300AD’s geopolitical vision, it remains a useful (if flawed) resource. The world map, national summaries, and discussions of post-Twilight War culture and politics help fill in gaps left by the core game and earlier publications. There are even moments of genuine insight and creativity, especially when the book focuses on the quieter, more grounded elements of life on Earth. But these moments are often overshadowed by the half-hearted dive into cyberpunk tropes, which feel tacked on rather than organically developed.

In the end, the Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook tries to have its cake and eat it too, marrying GDW’s traditionally serious approach to history, politics, and military matters to the more outlandish claims of the then-nascent cyberpunk genre. The final result is neither fish nor fowl. It gestures toward the grit and style of Cyberpunk without committing to its worldview, while simultaneously diluting the strengths of 2300AD’s grounded speculative realism. It is, I think, a rare and notable misstep in a game line that is otherwise quite measured and “realistic.” Even today, I remain disappointed by the book, not because it lacked potential, but because it failed to realize the one thing it could have done best: shine a clear and coherent light on Earth’s future without losing sight of what made 2300AD compelling in the first place.