Retrospective: Colonial Atlas

As you know, I've been refereeing a Twilight: 2000 campaign, Barrett's Raiders, since December 2021. Earlier this year, its focus shifted from war-torn Poland to post-nuclear America. As much as I'd enjoyed the earlier portion of the campaign, I was, in fact, very much looking forward to this new chapter. A big reason why is that I was very keen to see the characters take part in the rebuilding of the USA in the aftermath of the Twilight War. I thought that was a great frame for a thoughtful, serious military RPG campaign.

Of course, another reason why I was so keen on this is that I had dreams – likely never to be realized – of one day following up Barrett's Raiders with a 2300AD (né Traveller: 2300) campaign that linked back in some way to the events of the former. That's always been a big part of the appeal of 2300AD: its connection to the future history of Twilight: 2000 and how it extrapolates forward from that starting point. I thought doing something similar had the makings of an "ultimate campaign," hence my continued hope that I just might be able to pull it off. 

I was reminded of all of this just the other night, when I was refereeing Barrett's Raiders. That, in turn, reminded me of some of the better products GDW published for 2300AD, like the Colonial Atlas. Published in 1988, the Colonial Atlas is, like the game it was written to support, steeped in a particular strain of late Cold War futurism, one that eschews the gleaming utopias and mythic space opera of other SF RPGs in favor of grit, realism, and geopolitical nuance. It is, in many ways, one of the most emblematic products of 2300AD’s worldview: a sober, unromantic look at the challenges of extrasolar colonization in a future that looks suspiciously like 1980s Earth but with (slightly) better technology.

The Colonial Atlas presents over two dozen settled worlds in human space, each with varying levels of development, threat, and potential for adventure. The core of the book is planetary gazetteer material, and if that sounds dry, it can be – but it's also fascinating. Each entry provides topographical, ecological, and political data about a given colony, along with historical notes and adventure hooks. The book thus functions as an indispensable setting guide for any 2300AD referee, but it’s more than just a travelog. It’s also a window into a setting that takes its own premises seriously (which is exactly what you'd expect from a GDW RPG).

The detail is frequently impressive, if occasionally overwhelming. The worlds presented aren't just backdrops for adventure. There’s an almost obsessive focus on hard science plausibility, something that feels like a logical extension of what we got in Traveller, but here it’s applied to planetary settlement in a way that’s more NASA than, say, Star Trek. What’s more interesting, though, is how the Colonial Atlas uses that detail to underscore the difficulty, even futility, of colonization. Many worlds are hostile, economically marginal, or politically unstable. These are not shining beacons of a post-scarcity future. Instead, they are struggling frontier outposts, often abandoned by their Earthside sponsors and left to fend for themselves.

The geopolitical tension that underpins 2300AD is deeply felt here. Each of the great Earth powers – France, Manchuria, America, and others – has carved out slices of the galaxy and the resulting colonial patchwork is rife with competition, suspicion, and occasional violence. This is the Age of Empire redux, and the Colonial Atlas wears that cynicism openly. Even the book’s graphic design, with its utilitarian charts, maps, and wireframe esthetics, contributes to the sense of a future built by bureaucrats and engineers, not by dreamers. To be clear, that's not a criticism. The universe described in the Colonial Atlas is very much in line with movies like Outland or the Alien films (both of them) and that's something I've always enjoyed.

As a game supplement, the Colonial Atlas does its job well. It provides structure and inspiration for countless adventures, whether in the form of local unrest, corporate espionage, environmental disasters, or alien mysteries. As an artifact from the late 1980s, it also captures the mindset of that particular moment in history, when SF speculation looked to the future and saw not transcendence, but the same old human problems projected across the stars. Its vision of the future is one where the then-modern world hadn’t so much evolved as metastasized.

Colonial Atlas was always among my favorite 2300AD products, though it's not perfect by any means. I suspect that writers Timothy B. Brown, Rob Caswell, and Deb Zeigler often knew little or nothing about the foreign countries and languages about which they wrote. There are numerous egregious errors in the book's use of French, for instance – Provence Nouveau instead of Nouvelle Provence as the name of the French Alpha Centauri colony being just one example – so I imagine similar cruelties have been inflected on other tongues as well. Likewise, some of the colonies presented are downright dull, offering little in the way of reasons for ever visiting them in a campaign. Maybe that's the point, but, even so, I would have liked a little more imagination or at least a hint of mystery. Even in a setting grounded in realism, adventure needs somewhere to take root.

It's still too early to say whether the Barrett's Raiders campaign will one day give birth to 2300AD campaign. If it does happen, though, I have no doubt I'll making good use of the Colonial Atlas. It's a solid little supplement with lots to recommend it, even more than three decades later.