In The Year 2000: The Timeline of the Twilight:2000 Universe

 

The Twilight: 2000 TTRPG was released by GDW in 1984, during the height of the Cold War.  The prior year saw not only the Able Archer wargames by NATO that the Soviets had thought was going to be a cover for a sudden attack on them, but the September incident where one of their missile detection systems falsely declared incoming US nuclear missiles.  An RPG where the players were soldiers separated from their military unit during a nuclear seemed to be not such a farfetched scenario.

The plot of the war deviates from the standard East versus West struggle in that it begins with a war between Russia and China.  When mounting casualties cause the Soviet Union to demand the Warsaw Pact members provide troops to assist in the war, some of them begin to question their loyalty when Pact units are thrown to the front of the line and are ground up - in particular, East Germany, which begins secret talks with their Western brethren to reunite.  Events begin to escalate from there, and eventually the war turns nuclear... and still continues.  In the game's setting, it is 4 years since the war began, and NATO forces make a final push through Poland, only to encounter unexpected Soviet forces.  Both sides founder and splinter, and the PCs are left in the wake of a rapidly disintegrating war in the middle of foreign territory.

The game had a 2nd edition which tweaked the rules and updated the timeline to reflect recent events.  In addition, a near-future sci-fi TTRPG called Travller:2300 was set in the future of the TW2K universe, where the Earth managed to survive and eventually discover interstellar travel and alien races.  A later updated version, Twilight 2013, was briefly released by a different company in 2006.  Much more recently, Free League has put out an excellent 3rd edition boxed set with future supplements on the way, while PDF-only new material for the original game has been released through DriveThroughRPG.com. 

What I've created here is a comprehensive timeline for the Twilight: 2000 game (and partially for Traveller: 2300).  I had created one years ago that sat on a website on my grad school account 20 years ago, and has made sporadic appearances since then.  This is much more update to date and streamlined than the old version.

My hope is to eventually revisit doing a gazetteer and Order Of Battle of the universe (and begin comparing the 3rd edition material once more of it comes out - as usual, Free League's products are exemplary).

Here is the link to the Word doc.