40K-ish Friday - Battletech Gothic

 

I'm so glad to see the return of one of my favorite out of print GW ... wait it's what? From who? Well, alright ...

I waited a week to let this thing percolate before I posted on it but my thoughts on it haven't changed and they come down to 3 main questions: 

• Who is this for? 
• Who is excited about this? 
• Is this the best way to spend your resources on building the BT game?

Prologue:

I've been playing Battletech for a long time. I've had ebbs and flows as far as my time and interest level but it's never gone completely away and I still have the first miniatures and books and things I bought back around 1986. I've been playing 40K since it came out in 1987 and I've been playing Warhammer Fantasy since the second edition came out in 1985. Yeah the 80's were a busy time. 

I've never heard anyone say, while playing Battletech, "I wish this game was more like 40K". Not once. Ever. 

When BT came out there were some surface similarities. The 3025 universe was post-apocalyptic in that much technology had been lost, very few places could make new mechs and even making parts for them was rare. Most mechs were repaired and rebuilt from salvaged machines and components. It made even a lance of four mechs a considerable force in the lore. Scenario books recreating "historical" confrontations would mention which mechs were present and what kinds of damage should be applied to them pre-battle to represent that bad leg actuator or missing laser. They got away from that aspect of the setting pretty quickly though and eventually that lost tech thing and damaged mechs being a standard expectation disappeared. Nowadays we have thousands of new mechs being constructed every year, not to mention the whole Clan situation.

Today it's much more of a "future Tom Clancy" type setting with new technology and specific weapons platforms taking the lead alongside political machinations between the houses and clans and whatever version of ComStar exists at the time. This makes for decent novels  and provides plenty of hooks for a campaign whether purely BT or going full RPG. It's "clean" in comparison to something like 40K - not a lot of tentacles, if you know what I mean.

But now we have this latest effort. Yes, I assumed it was an April Fool's joke. It's not. Alright so ...

Who is supposed to be excited here? 

Is this to try and draw in 40K players? I would think a lot of them would already be aware of Battletech as a game between the Battletech PC game from ten years ago or so,  the more recent Mechwarrior 5, and the resurgence of tabletop BT driven by Catalyst's Kickstarters  and boxed sets and new miniatures over say the last 5 years. I'd say Battletech has a much higher profile in the last 5 years than it had before - since the 90's at least. So I don't think awareness is a problem.

A part of this may be the thinking that if you make it look like 40K it will get more attention from that crowd. Well, maybe, but I don't think so. It appears to be mostly the same game underneath and that's a very different animal than any version of 40K. The look is only a part of the appeal of 40K.

• Both games have been building up their lore for roughly 40 years. BT is a combination of Historical Novel and Techno-Thriller. 40K is Epic Myth and Action Movie. The feel, the "vibe" is completely different between the games and the universes. People like the "grimdark" and 40K originated the grimdark - taking on the original when it's as strong and popular as it has ever been seems like a mistake. Battletech has strong lore but it is completely different than Warhammer 40,000 (no aliens, no psychic powers, no AI) and making a new offshoot of that is putting your new lore, unsupported by any prior products, up against the massive juggernaut that is the Warhammer Universe. 
  
  
  

  

  You know what quote goes here don't you?

  
  
•  There is also the scale and scope of the game. BT tends to focus on mech action with a side dish of tanks, infantry, and aircraft for some players. I'd say 20 models per side is a big game in BT. In 40K the focus is driven per-army and could be a 100+ infantry on one side against fewer than 10  Knights or superheavies on the other - typically it is a mix of both. The look of a "typical" game of each looks wildly different as far as terrain, unit type, unit count. A lot of BT games happen on a hexmap, even with the miniatures, while a 40K game is always a pure measuring tape on an un-gridded table kind of game. 
  
  Most people could play both without much effort but most people also have a preference for on or the other and despite BT's standard approach being easier to set up I'd say 40K's approach  has more popularity and that's not likely to change by putting gribby monsters into the robot game. 
• Speaking of monsters let's talk about that. They're putting some kind of monsters/kaiju into the Gothic game. That's a huge change for Battletech. That's breaking at least one of the main rules of the universe and hey it might broaden the appeal. I've thought for a long time that a "mechs vs. kaiju" type option for BT would get some attention but I was envisioning something more like Pacific Rim than chaos beasts and daemon engines from Warhammer. So I like them working this angle in somehow, but then they go and leave them out of the boxed set! It's all mechs, and I believe it's alternate sculpts of mechs that already have new miniatures! This is effectively the starter box for a new setting and you can't include the very thing that makes it different from the old setting? That seems like a terrible decision. Even including paper stand-ups of the monsters is a fail - that may work for Battletech players but that hasn't been acceptable for 40K players since 1993 ... and it's still a meme today.

Who is this for? 

Effectively there are 3 groups at play here: Existing Battletech players, Existing 40K/Other miniature game players, and people who are not actively involved in any of these games at this time. 

• Existing (and lapsed) Battletech players: Existing players seem to be somewhat split on this one. I see a few people saying give it a chance. I see a lot of people not liking it at all - for various reasons. I can sum up my own take as a BT fan like this:
• If I want Gothic 40K exists and does it better than anyone has done or is doing
• As an existing player and fan of the only setting they've had up until now splitting this off into an "Elseworlds" side story means I can just sit this one out. It has no impact on the story I like and know and I have no history with it so unless I just really want to have my Thunderbolt punch a Great Uncelan One in the face I can skip this. It's the first boxed set in years that the core Battletech fan can ignore. And if I want to have a big robot punch a big demon in the face ... again, 40K exists. 
• Also a new setting and a new style of mech and the introduction of monsters means I would need to consider building up one or two new armies just for this game. Or I could just keep adding mechs and other forces to the stuff I use in the main game. 
  
  The one real opportunity here might be with people who stopped playing Battletech at some point because it was boring or the universe seemed stagnant or they were just burned out. This does give a new type of combatant and a new look to the old combatants and that might be enough to convince some people to check it out.
  
  
• Existing 40K/GW players: They mostly don't care about Battletech - or any other miniatures game either. 
• This is the main factor they are up against: the general arrogance of Games Workshop players. A large number of 40K players only play 40K and if they do play another tabletop game it's another GW game like Age of Sigmar or Kill Team. GW markets it as "the Games Workshop Hobby" and a lot of people buy into that - they won't even look at another miniatures game. This is something that all other miniature games face and it hurts Kings of War, it hurts Flames of War, it hurts Bolt Action, it hurts Crisis Protocol, and even the Star Wars games. Many of the companies publishing miniatures games today were founded by ex-GW employees and they often view the GW customer as their customer but the Fortress of Arrogance is not just for Comissar Yarrick. Non-GW games are looked down upon and dismissed as inferior by many of the people playing 40K and the other GW games. One element of this is popularity - as in, if Game X is good then why isn't it more popular? Battletech is reasonably popular but I don't think it measures anywhere near the numbers 40K hits in sales, convention & tournament attendance, and online presence. This new take might help but I don't think it's going to make a big dent in the state of things.
• Lapsed 40K players might be a different story as there is a fairly high turnover in those games and they often come out of it looking for something new. For them BT's rules barely changing in 40 years will be a feature when compared to GW's 3-year cycle and constant FAQs and points updates. A more 40K-like version of Battletech might gain some followers here.
  
  
• People who don't play miniature combat type games at all right now: I don't think this is likely to pull in much at all as these people also don't care. If they did, they'd be playing 40K or BT already and if they're new they will probably pick one of those "pure" options instead. A new RPG that's more like 5E D&D would likely pull in more new players to the BT universe than a new flavor of tabletop Succession Wars.

Finally, resources: 

Assuming you can only support one boxed set for Battletech per year - and they've needed Kickstarters to do that - then is this a good move for the game, the players, and the brand in general? Players are already talking about this taking resources from the main game. 

• Some miniature sets have already been delayed. Players don't like it when announced projects are held up for a surprise side-project
• There are major areas of the game that could use a refresh -like fighter combat. Wouldn't a cool boxed set of new spacefighter miniatures featuring a streamlined air/space combat system make more sense? It would give a new (refreshed at least) angle on things and still tie into the main universe. Your goal should be something like X-Wing which was really popular for a few years until the company screwed it up: A game based on small numbers of units playable in a relatively short amount of time by more casual fans. This would also provide an avenue to draw new players in to the rest of the game, allow an option to upscale things by making a Dropship expansion, and potentially tie in to a capital ship combat game (which they have said is in the works) by introducing ships and characters to new players and re-introducing them to the old players who may not have cared about space combat for years. Note that this is not "reprint Aerotech with new art" - this should be a new system that makes it simpler than and distinct from classic Battletech but can still interact with it in some way. That's just one example.
• They've talked about supporting the new line with additional miniatures - many of which would not fit in with or be usable with at all in regular Battletech games. Yet another resource draw.
• There is also talk of this being the first of an ongoing series of parallel universe games. This from a company that's had trouble keeping elements of their main game in stock. Now you're going to have a bunch of "stub" universes with limited support alongside the main game? They mentioned a more anime-flavored universe, a 50's style retro-tech universe (aiming for the Fallout crowd?), maybe a steampunk universe ... but what does that do for me as a player? That mostly sounds like alternate mech designs but how does the game change? If it's just republishing the same mechs over and over  - as we see with Gothic - who cares? That is seriously catering to existing fans, not attempting to expand the game or bring in new ones. Support is a real question - in 5 years how much support will there be for Gothic? For whichever other universes get the greenlight?  Will there be Technical Readouts? Timeline updates? Novels? What's the realistic lifespan of these things?

So yes, I'm pretty negative on Battletech Gothic. I totally understand wanting to expand the product line but this just seems like a misstep and a sidetrack.  Additionally this year's hot new 40K challenger is Trench Crusade which is also grimdark and violent and has all of the usual make-your-parents-mad imagery. I suspect the bulk of the "wanting something like 40K that isn't actually 40K" crowd is being pulled in that direction, further limiting the opportunities here. 

PostScript: 

If you're willing to compete with GW head to head and want to make something new why not make a 28mm skirmish game set in the Nth Succession War and have your basic units be infantry squads and individual vehicles with an occasional appearance by battlemechs? You could make basic infantry squads for each house (and merc unit and periphery bandit group) and also for each major time period (fewer bullets, more lasers as time goes on) and then make some vehicle kits as those are universal across houses. You have some interesting unit variety in the universe already with rifle infantry, laser infantry, and jump infantry and the basic trilogy of wheeled/tracked/hover vehicles plus the VTOL option. We have light medium and heavy tanks, transports, artillery, scout units, recovery vehicles, and even coolant trucks already. We have special elite units in many houses like Liao Death Commandos and the inevitable ninjas from House Kurita. Later in the timeline you get powered armor units. Battlemechs could be a limited use option like knights in 40K and would make for awesome centerpiece models in 28mm scale. 

It just seems like both a new and an obvious way to go to please existing fans while getting some attention from people playing other games that might be looking for something. Yet instead of this we get Mechs vs. Squiggoths ... 

 

The Hard Realities of the Mechwarrior Campaign

I'm approaching a confluence of variable factors when it comes to our ongoing RPG time and I'm going to have to make some decisions.

First, Con Season approaches. Four of my eight regular players are involved with putting on a convention  - and have been for years so this is not really a new problem - and it nukes their availability for part of the summer. The variables here are "when does this interference start?" and "how long does it last?" and now I know these details so I know July is going to be thinner and best case is that for about 5 weeks I will have 4 players at most. We non-cons will keep playing but it will probably not be "the main game".

Second, We are nearing the end of the opening situation for the Mechwarrior campaign so I need to decide how to proceed long-term: Are we going to keep on with the Battletech thing or are we going to do something else? For July we will need to do something else anyway so can I lay the groundwork for a new thing there or is it just an interlude until the full crew re-gathers in August? More details below but I will probably start a new campaign with another system & setting and think about coming back to Mechwarrior down the road. 

Here it comes ...

Third, I really am not enjoying the MW 3rd edition as a system and my players are not terribly attached to it either. The first part of the campaign was intentionally mech-heavy and we used the Battletech rules directly for most of that. This past weekend was a zero as far as mech content but involved meeting some other members of the unit, exploring the local city where they are stationed, and getting into a bar fight. They had a good time but the rules kept getting in the way and I am ready to replace them. More on that below.

So I have these factors all coming together at around the same time.

In addition I have realized that I am not quite as much of a Battletech Universe fan as I was. All of the later metaplot stuff after 3060-something means nothing to me. I have a ton of material for the earlier era and I still know it well enough that it's the era that makes the most sense for me to run but when it comes to fictional gaming universes there are others I enjoy more. This doesn't mean that I don't like it enough to run something in it - just that running it for a year or more straight might not be the way I want to go. BT also suffers from something I have seen in way too many game settings: namely the "lore" tends to be page after page of dryly written history and dates and names and none of it really means anything nor does it add anything to the campaign I am running right here and now! 
(More on that in another post)

Catalyst, while I have a problem with some of what they do, has at least gotten the game back into circulation with decent support and a new line of miniatures that might actually be better then the metal line we've had for decades. The boxed sets are nice, the art is decent, there is an alternate set of rules for tabletop Battletech -Alpha Strike - and two sets of RPG rules as well. So the support is actually pretty good after a long gap. 

The problem may just be that my tastes have changed a lot since I played and ran these games years ago.

  Wow, how insightful, your interests as a teen to twenty-something may not be the same ones you have at 50+, yeah, applause all around for this discovery. 

I know, I know, but a lot of my tastes have not changed that much - keeping it to hobby topics I still like RPG's, and miniatures, and board and card games. In fact, I like a lot of the same ones I did back then. Despite that Battletech feels decidedly old-school rules-wise even with a modern wrapper on it. Alpha Strike is no help as it loses almost everything that makes BT unique, like hit locations and all of the details on the various weapons. Sure it plays faster but it plays nothing like Battletech to me so why bother? 

Star Fleet Battles has this issue too but they came out with Federation Commander years ago which somehow manages to keep 90% of the look and feel of classic SFB while streamlining it and modernizing it in important ways. I think that was a goal with Alpha Strike but it just does not work for me.

The Battletech RPGs have a similar problem. Mechwarrior 3rd edition is from 1999 but it feels like a much older game. The basic core mechanic is a lot like Traveller with d10's: 2d10 + skill level vs. a target number of 10, roll high. Typical skill level for most people is 1-2 with some getting to a 3-4 and not many going over 5. It is possible to have a "0" skill level in something representing training with no real experience. Just reading through the initial system mechanics I thought it was decently playable. The issue is that they then go and add the old-school-list-of-comprehensive-modifiers that makes every roll a checklist scan prior to the actual roll. For example for combat the base target number is not ten but it's not a set stat or skill or anything else either - there are 4 different "base target numbers" for each of melee and ranged ... here, take a look at it yourself.

Also the damage system  -after you jump through the hoops with all those modifiers then damage is another chart where you compare the damage rolled to a set of numbers to find out what you actually did to the target. Imagine if you were playing Mutants and Masterminds but still rolled damage based on each attack but then still had to consult a chart to find out the actual effect:

I'm sure it would play faster if we spent more time on it but the problem is that after taking up much of a session just trying out personal combat I am not terribly excited about doing it again and neither are my players. I'm going to run the campaign in this system to it's planned end point but if we pick it up again I'm probably going to run it in another system. Right now I'm actually looking at GURPS as a strong candidate for this and I haven't run GURPS in 20 years. However, if you want mostly normal humans in a setting where they are terribly vulnerable to modern weaponry it's a solid candidate. It would take some customization to things like the skill list and some of the equipment but it might just be worth it. Savage Worlds is on the list as well as we know it pretty well and it would be another easy adaptation. Heck, I have half a mind to tweak up a version of Star Wars d6 system just to see how well that would work.

"But if you're willing to mod GURPS or Savage Worlds why not just mod this game?" - well, because having run it again now I just don't find this game all that appealing. Somehow it worked for us 20+ years ago but it just falls flat for me now. It's not just the skill system - character generation was lengthy and involved and I thought having all of those house books with specific background tables (it has a kind of lifepath system) would really immerse my players in the setting. It sort of did that but it mostly just took forever and drained everyone at the table's life force away right when they should have been getting excited. Then there is a convoluted system to convert the point system used during character generation to the different point system used during play and for XP.  Then the XP system turns out to be terrible too so it just fails to shine for me. The novels tend to be fairly cinematic yet the RPG mechanics do almost nothing to reinforce that feel and so there's nothing about the game that really "feels" Battletech the way Star Wars d6 feels like Star Wars or the Warhammer Fantasy RPG feels like the gritty universe of old school Warhammer. There's just nothing special about it. 

Pretty much every subsystem of this game feels like it has extra - and unnecessary -  steps and I'm ready to try something else for our out-of-mech action. 

This probably came out a little harsher than originally intended and this is by no means an "unplayable" game - I've been running it for months now. It is totally playable but I don't like playing it as much as some other systems I know and there are probably other rules that will do this in a way I like better. So that's the plan now. More to come on this journey ...

The Promise of the Long Term Mechwarrior Campaign

 

So why did I choose to run a Mechwarrior campaign? Regardless of rules, the setting has a ton of potential. Let me focus in on 3 things that put it over the top for me:

1) The particulars of the setting:    

• It's science fiction but there are no aliens and no psionics. This does limit things somewhat in comparison to say, Star Trek or Warhammer 40,00 but it is nice sometimes to dive into a straight-up-human-centric universe with no supernatural weirdness.
  (Was this a reaction to running Deadlands for the last few years? Why no, certainly not!)
• It is set in the future of the real world. Granted it's 1000 years in the future and there are things like FTL travel and giant robots with directed energy weapons but there are recognizable cultures and languages still present. It's usually easier to explain House Kurita as being heavily influenced by Japanese culture than say to explain Klingon culture if someone is unfamiliar with Trek. Earth is still a place you could go and English is still a language people speak - among many others.
• The aforementioned giant robots! This is the major part of Battletech's appeal, right? Tons of designs, tons of art, the ability to modify them or just make up your own with a heavily battle-tested set of rules - this is the main draw!

2) The support: There is almost 40 years of material tied to this setting from boardgames to RPG's to videogames to novels to comic books to at least one mediocre animated series. If you want to do your own thing you certainly can but if you want to dig into the place and see where you could hang your ideas on to the setting there is  likely to be a time period or planet or faction that works for what you have in mind. From toppling interplanetary governments to locating where that one particular battlemech model was produced before the early Succession Wars blew up the factory to fighting in mech-based gladiatorial arenas there are a ton of campaign options out there. Finally, if you want to run a war story from infantry to tanks to mechs to aircraft to space battles there may be more supporting material here than for any other RPG.

3) The timeline: This is a very strong point to me. There is a bunch of history sketched out for a GM but the most interesting part is where the game started: a post-apocalyptic era of damaged and limited mechs that are nowhere near what they once were ... mostly operated by noble families where much technology has been lost and resources are scarce. Then we begin a slow climb upward where technology is slowly rediscovered, factories reopen, and life gets better - just in time for the leaders to start a major war. technology continues to progress as planets change hands and mechs come into play and then just as things settle down the Inner Sphere gets hit with the clan invasion which upsets the whole apple cart and then some odd stuff with ComStar getting too big for their britches. 

This roughly 50 year stretch gives us a big, global backdrop to run whatever kind of game we want with some major events to hang things on and it's pretty easy to see the campaign as being about much more than one group of PC's. As the back of the 20-Year-Update said "don't think of your character as being 20 years older  - think of his son as being ready for battle". This sets up an interesting potential mix of ongoing war story across several generations. You don't have to use any of it if you don't want to but it's all there if you do. Once you pick a  starting point your mission is to let you players mess up the timeline as much as they want to! Sure, if you want to the Clan Invasion still happens - or maybe it doesn't! maybe there is a different Davion on the throne when it does ... or a different Steiner!  Maybe your players lead an expedition Beyond the Sphere and run into the Clans first!

The cool thing is that you have a timeline laid out to follow or ignore as you choose and if your players have some familiarity with the setting it only gets better as they recognize things and then eventually figure out you've left "canon" behind and it's a whole new world out there.

This was part of my vision when I started this operation: Play a group from 3025 on up through the next succession war and eventually into the Clan Invasion and beyond, likely through at least two generations of PC's and possibly a 3rd.

There's the big upside of a Mechwarrior campaign. 

Tomorrow the not-so-up parts ...

Mechwarrior 3rd Edition- Our Campaign in 2024

 

This has been the main RPG for this year so far - even if I haven't been posting much about it here - so I thought I would pause and talk about it a little bit. 

We started in February with a character generation session after playing several one-off Battletech fights over the last few months. Since then we've had 7 playing sessions. I've had from 4-8 players each time. I implemented a "5 or more players = Mechwarrior" rule (4 or less means we play Marvel Heroic) though I broke that for the last session because the cancellations were last minute and I knew we would have a break this week anyway. 

Most of sessions so far have been in-mech combat and I can say that 8 players each running their own mech vs. 1 GM running all of the opposition is a challenge though there are several things that help. 

• Using various markers including those fancy modifier dice to show mods for both the attacker and defender are a big help
• Writing down things on each mech sheet - other weird modifiers, planned target or course of action, etc. - help keep things from getting lost in the table-wide back and forth discussion.
• Colors - putting a sticker or something on the mech and the mech sheet stands out more than small print.
• Having a player who is more up on Battletech's rules and current background than I am means I have a mechanics sub-processor to help expedite the turns for everyone so I can focus more on what the bad guys are doing.
• Use one or at most two kinds of opponents - either all mechs, mechs + tanks, or tanks + infantry. Don't try to work in a massive combined arms force with artillery and air support dug into some fortifications - at least not early on. That way lies madness ...

The campaign is set in 3025 and the premise is that a group of experienced characters (MW3 has a very thorough lifepath system for chargen) is joining a medium-sized merc unit. They get to know each other on the dropship but as they approach their destination they are forced into an unplanned combat drop before they even meet the rest of their unit. 

At this point we are past the initial combat and the PCs have made an important discovery on their way to finally link up with the rest of the Battalion. We have spent way more time with the BT rules than we have the MW rules thus far but that started changing last session and should continue next session. 

The MW3 rules still feel fairly clunky to me but we will give them a good run-through for now. My concept to start this campaign off is from notes I made 20 years ago in preparation for a game I never actually started. I found them in the ol' binder, looked through them, still liked the idea, and decided to go with it so HANG ON TO THOSE NOTES! Sometimes it does pay off!

Once we've covered the initial scenario we may have a forced interruption due to half my players being part of a convention crew and afterwards we will have to decide if we want to continue this campaign or switch to something else. There is a lot of interest in making this a long term game and seeing our party face the Clan invasion and all of those future upheavals. If we do continue I will seriously consider changing to another set of rules based on what I have seen so far. That could be Savage Worlds, Traveller, or it might be a good reason to dust off GURPS and see if that works for us. Shaking off the rust has been more of an effort than I expected.  There is a chance further MW3 experience might shift my opinion but right now I'm not in love with the system. 

Eventually I will post up some session reports here or link to it on Obsidian Portal as one of my players is taking in-universe session notes which should be pretty entertaining.

Battletech: The Technical Readouts

 

The TRO's are the "fun" books of the line. They give you game stats for a bunch of mechs for a given time period but they also give you a big illustration and then they also give the history of that design, where it was produced, how it was used, variants, and some sample mechwarriors who use it. The original 3025 TRO up there was where the BT universe really started to take off as a "real" place. It set a certain tone and a certain look that has never been exceeded in my opinion. Part of this was having a single artist do all of the work for this book - that consistency really welded the whole thing together. 

Time marches on though and later there was a 3026 TRO covering more vehicles and personal gear, 2750 stepping back to Star League mechs, then 3050 bringing in the clans and updating the Inner Sphere mechs to higher tech, and 3055 adding even more and then on and on for a few of decades. There were tweaks to the content as the whole "Unseen" kerfluffle erupted resulting in the need to remove the images of some of those classic anime-sourced designs. Then there was their eventual replacement using new looks for the same stats - a mixed bag there. Then the eventual reinstatement of the originals after some legal victories.  The basic mix of TRO's was the same though - new ones tended to add-on rather than replace old books.

Recently though Catalyst has revamped the whole thing and tied them in to their more formal "Era" approach. Now instead of "3025" and "3050" TRO's we have  "Succession Wars" and a "Clan Invasion" TRO. 

I will say they do look good and the design and branding and all that ties them in to the rest of the line nicely so you can easily tell these are the current thing and not an older edition. With as much Battletech stuff as is floating around out there I think it does matter.

There are others besides these two - one for Jihad and Dark Age and probably ilClan too but I haven't delved too far into those eras yet as my existing familiarity peters out around the Jihad timeframe. These do use a lot of the old artwork which is nice but there are some quirks. Despite the legal issues being resolved some of the iconic unseen mechs do not appear in these which is disappointing. You have to go to the "Recognition Guide Vol. 1" to get those. 

This one covers all of the old IS mechs plus all of those clan second-line mechs that were based on them - the "IIC" versions some of you may recall. 

Like this one ...

Also a lot of the old Star League mechs have been retconned into having a 3025-era declining tech version, presumably to fill in the gaps left by the missing classic mechs. It's weird to see a Black Knight and a Flashman mixed in with 3025 staples like an Archer or an Orion. But it does make them useable with an official version in that time period so it's not really a problem - just a wrinkle in time for some of us old-timers that skipped out for a bit.

So where do these books fall? Well, once you've played the base game you could pick up the Succession Wars TRO and use most of the mechs in it in your games.  The Battlemech Manual discussed in the prior post will give you all of the rules you might need for the rest of them, plus it would cover the mechs in the other volumes like the Clan Invasion book. 

On another level these effectively serve as a catalog for picking up mech miniatures - here's what it does in-game and here's how it looks ... see anything you like?  I know that just showing people that original 3025 TRO pulled in a lot of new players back when so they are powerful tools when done right. 

Today there are effectively four elements to the Battletech tabletop game: The Boxed Sets, the Rulebooks, the TRO's, and the miniatures. You can certainly start with just one of the boxes but if you enjoy the game you will likely be picking up some of the other pieces as well. 

Let's talk about the miniatures next.

 

Battletech: Beyond the Basics

 

So the box sets are the main entry point to Battletech these days as you get rules, maps, and mini's all in one go. But what about after you have that? You picked up a box, played a few games, decided that you want to do more ... what now? There are options.

One fairly easy option is the Battlemech Manual which is one of the newer books in the line. It contains all of the rules you need to play fights with mechs. It's about 150 pages long and is ridiculously comprehensive. This one has all of the relevant rules - the sequence of play, movement & terrain, ranged and physical combat, plus environmental and battlefield types and effects - which take up about half of the book. The other half is all of the equipment for mechs in the game and covers all eras, including some stuff I do not recognize which I assume is from the later "Eras" of the game that have come out since I let it go years back.  A short final section covers "common misconceptions" and discusses specific situations that come up in play that people seem to get wrong. These kinds of reviews and example are great and I have enjoyed seeing them in 40K "Rules Commentary" sections so it is a good feeling to see them here. 

This book will let you run any kind of mech fight and isn't that what most of us are looking for in a Battletech game? This is the most recent wording of the rules out there and should be the easiest to use. It's a great product. If you have a boxed set and want to do more this is probably the way to go next. That said, it is priced about the same as the next book which has ... more.

Bonus Points: This book contains a section on "Quirks". Quirks are a section that covers all of those minor things about a mech that aren't really part of a particular rule or piece of equipment but that give it flavor. One example: the Warhammer's should mounted searchlight. It's a holdover from the Robotech/Macross model but it's been there from day one and some earlier versions of the rules covered it but it was always kind of a weird outlier. Now it's a quirk - "Searchlight" that has a few rules tied to it. There are positive quirks like "Ubiquitous", "Easy to Maintain", and "Rugged". There are also negative quirks like "Bad Reputation", "Cramped Cockpit", and "Weak Head Armor". 

Now in a typical one-off fight these may not matter a whole lot but in an ongoing campaign - particularly an RPG campaign like I am running right now - these are just great. More flavor without a complicated system to drive it is exactly how this kind of thing should be handled and I applaud it being included here. 

Well here it is, the big daddy of the BT rulebooks. This one is 300 pages long and covers everything the Batllemech Manual does and then adds a bunch more. Besides what I listed above you now have section on vehicles (that's non-mech vehicles like tanks and artillery), infantry (foot, mounted, and battle armor), protomechs, and aerospace combat - this has an entirely separate chunk in the movement chapter covering space movement and then a later chapter covering the units and how they fight and take damage. This mainly covers fighters and dropships - not the big boys - but those are the parts most likely to show up in a mech-focused game. There is also a chapter on scenario design which is something game has needed for a long time which gives examples of selecting maps, units, and victory conditions. This is a solid section and gives more options than the typical basic approach of just blowing up each others' mechs for a few hours. 

Now there are additional books out there to add more rules for things like extended campaigns and space operations but those are more like add-on systems for doing particular things. This book is generally the one-stop shop for all things Battletech when it comes to getting out some map sheets and rolling some dice.

Bonus Points: There is a short section near the back that covers "Mechanized Battle Armor" This is guys in powered armor suits (like Clan Elementals) grabbing some handholds and riding along on the outside of a mech. This section in particular covers all of the bad things that can happen if, say, you get shot while they are clinging to your mech ... or if you fall down while carrying them ... or drop prone on purpose ... or run into something. In my experience this is a fairly uncommon situation but this shows you the level of things included in this book.

One note - neither of these books contains the construction rules, they are strictly about using what is already built. For full building things rules you need the Tech Manual.

This is 350 pages of mech construction, vehicle construction, aerospace unit construction, battle armor, etc. Years ago much of this kind of information was spread out among different boxes and books but this covers it all now. There is a lot of lore on various pieces of gear such as how it was developed and when it came into service which is great for an RPG campaign but the vast majority of it is design sequences for the various elements of the BT universe. I love this stuff but it's definitely more relevant after you have been playing for a while.

So there are the two big main rulebooks for Battletech plus the big construction book.. There are other books which I will cover in some additional posts  - TRO's, the Advanced Operations books, and of course the RPG options. For now though if trying to decide between these it really comes down to what ou expect to play for the immediate future: Are you good focusing on mech to mech combat or do you want to go full-spectrum and pull in tanks and infantry and air support and the rest? If you are new or just getting back into the game I think the 'mech manual is a great escalation point and I would go there after the main boxed game. The tech manual is a serious piece of work but I would look at it after picking up one of the major rulebooks for sure. 

Battletech: Starting Out

 

With Battletech/Mechwarrior in full swing around here I have spent a couple of months re-familiarizing myself with it and catching up on the current state of the game. Knowing there may be both old lapsed grognards out there like me as well as some  potential interest from new players I thought I would run through the basics on where things stand with the game these days.

First a bit of an overview: Battletech started out in the 80's as a board wargame, quickly added miniatures (using the same boards), expanded into a role playing game set in the same universe, and morphed into a series of computer games soon after. There is an extensive line of novels, some comic books, and a Saturday morning cartoon. These days there are some real no-hexgrid miniature rules, an alternative set of tabletop rules,  games for space combat at various levels, and at least 5 versions of an official RPG. 

 The setting is described by Era. The original setting is now called the "Succession Wars Era" but here we still call it 3025. That's 3025 AD as the game is portrayed as the future of our own world with Earth being a significant location even if most of the action does not happen there. There is also the Clan Invasion Era (circa 3050), a prequel-ish era when the Star League was in control of known space (circa 2750) and then a bunch more eras set after the Clans finish invading and settle in for the long haul (circa 3067 or later). 

Originally the game was set in a time where repeated wars had degraded the technological and industrial base of the inner sphere to the point that advanced technology like mechs and spaceships were difficult to produce and not as effective as they had been in the past. This has largely been eroded with each subsequent future Era and is much less of a factor once you get into the Clan era and beyond. 

Much of the classic Battletech lore, mechs, tone, and just the general vibe of the thing is from the early days and the 3025/ Succession Wars era. Material from that time is what established the game we have today. Subsequent releases and updates have built on this foundation for better or for worse. 

Other notes: 

• There are no aliens in this setting. It is humans only. There are alien life forms like animals found on other planets but no alien civilizations and no intelligent aliens.
• Also there is no supernatural or psychic element here as you would find in a lot of modern sci-fi games. It is a grounded universe based on what we know now, outside of various violations of the laws of physics to allow giant fighting robots to be a sensible design choice and to allow for FTL travel.  

So if you're interested in the setting and the game where to start?

Currently there are 3 Battletech boxed game sets and the first one is the Introductory set. This is the smallest and least expensive set and it does serve as a decent introduction to the game.  If you're not sure about the whole thing this is the one to get. That said, if you do dive into the game and pick up the core set you will not be using this one much afterwards. It does come with two mech miniatures which is great but it is very much a product that will be superseded by the full rules in the main box. 

The contents are shown above - Mechs, mech sheets, maps, rulebook, dice, and ... fiction. Stories are a big part of the setting's appeal and they hit you with that from the start. This is where the characters and the color of the BT universe start to shine. 

The core set looks like this and is the current version of that original box up at the top. Besides more maps and more miniatures the big addition here is a) the full set of rules for playing the game with mechs and b) the construction rules. Mech construction and modification has been a part of the game from the very beginning and this set continues the tradition. So after playing a few games you too can start down the path of "what if I replaced these PPCs with large lasers?" and "How many medium lasers could I fit onto this mech?" and other fun exercises. 

This is plenty to get going with the game. The gear is limited to the 3025 era technology which is an awesome balance of size/weight/heat/ammunition that has been battle tested for almost 40 years now and the mechs here are classics everyone knows. You also get a decent breakdown of the structure and politics of the Inner Sphere which will give you a basic understanding of the setting and its factions. 

One note here that I see pop up online sometimes is that I've never felt like faction in this game is the kind of choice that it is in a game like Warhammer 40,000. Building something like an Imperial Guard army in that game is a major undertaking in time, money, effort, shelf space, and personalization. A lot of people may only have one or two armies for a long time with that game. Battletech is the opposite in many ways: you can play a game with one miniature, you can paint it however you like as there is no "House Kurita" paint job - there are many units serving the house and while there may be official schemes for some of the more famous units they use the same mechs as everyone else. So you are never really locked in to a "faction" choice in BT the way you are in 40K or Age of Sigmar, or even Bolt Action or Flames of War because any mech could show up in any army. 

If you're only going to get one set for this game this is the one to get.

The third boxed set is the Clan Invasion box. This moves the timeline up to 3050 and introduces a bunch of advanced technology for both the Inner Sphere and the invading Clans and a bunch of new mech designs as well. This really blows the game open though many long time players either dislike the whole Clan thing or feel like it is at least less well-balanced than the more limited 3025 era. I do not completely disagree with this take - and I was playing when this was the hot new thing - but if you keep playing Battletech at some point you will probably run into this. 

 I would call this the "Advanced" rules for sure. There are a bunch of new weapon types (added to all of the old ones), a new unit type   - "Elementals" - which are 5-man squads of powered armor that have their own rules, plus a new way to build mechs - Omni-Mechs  - which is used by the Clans and later copied by the Inner Sphere. The Omni option means that most weapons are in swappable modules so now each mech may have 4 or 5 standard configurations instead of a fixed loadout. The game does get a lot more complicated with all of this but if you want to play in newer eras of the setting it's something you will want to familiarize yourself with sooner or later. 

The change to this new technology base also complicates scenario building. In the old days we tended to set up fights by tonnage - each side takes a lance of 4 mechs, say 200 tons max. This approach relied on your knowledge of the mechs and possibly the terrain to pick a decent force. With 3050 tech you really have 3 different tech bases: old 3025-era IS, new and improved 3050-era IS, and Clan Tech - which is better than either of those. Ton for ton there is a tremendous difference at each of those levels. This brought about the introduction of BT's first point systems many years ago and the early versions were not good. I assume the current version of Battle Value (BT's points system) is workable but I haven't played enough games paying attention to it yet to be sure. If you're coming from other games where points are commonly used to balance opposing forces it is definitely something you want to look into at this level.

Finally there is a fourth box set coming following a Kickstarter last year but it is not out yet. This one focuses on Mercenaries in the BT universe which are a common trope from the earliest days of the game and are also the focus of many tabletop RPG campaigns as well as many of the computer games. It's a topic well worth a boxed set focus but we will have to see what it brings to the game. 

There are many, many other elements to the game, particularly books that add in the complete rules for other units in the game: tanks, infantry, artillery, air and space units, buildings and more. There are also a lot of "historical" supplements based on the setting describing the various factions and famous units of each era, various campaigns and events that happen in-universe, and everyone's favorite technical Readouts that show the mechs and vehicles of a given era.  I will talk through those in future posts. 

 

February Battletech

 

After laying dormant for at least a decade Battletech has been poking its head up regularly for the last few years and it did so again over the weekend. With schedule conflicts interrupting the RPG plans the night was open so we went with b-tech for me. Paladin Steve, and his son Apprentice P-Hawk ... because he always take a Phoenix Hawk. 

We agreed on 140 tons as a limit and ended up with Steve taking a Battlemaster and a Hatchetman while I took a Thunderbolt and a Crusader and Apprentice PH took a Phoenix Hawk (of course), a Warhammer, and a Wasp. This was a 3025 fight as it's just simpler than adding in all the Clan-era stuff to a small one-off fight. The battle took place on two mapboards. 

We played 7 turns and it was all fairly evenly matched though Some high points:

• Apprentice PH ran his PH out far enough that he took a lot of fire early. He did manage to back off so it survived until the end - unlike prior battles he has played.
• Having 3 mechs did give him an advantage as far as the initiative sequence goes because it's mech-by-mech and so we will avoid that next time. 
• For the first time in a long time we had two attempts at Death-From-Above. Neither of them connected but the miss damage didn't cripple anyone so it came out alright.
• We used some nifty markers I picked up online that indicate modifiers for movement for each mech and they did help a lot with running multiple mechs and I can see them helping even more as we escalate things. 
• The last turn saw some real craziness...
• My Crusader finally tagged the Warhammer with both LRM-15s and one cluster managed to punch through and score a crit on his SRM ammo and blew him off of the board!
• Paladin Steve's Battlemaster tagged the Phoenix Hawk in the head - the second head shot on him - and knocked the pilot out!
• Then Steve's Hatchetman chopped into the Wasp and blew up -his- SRM ammo, leaving Apprentice PH with two exploded mech and one still standing with an unconscious pilot! It was the most amazing single turn we've had in years. 

Handy - You can find these on Amazon and eBay and probably other places. 

The P-Hawk and the Warhammer were early favorites for many of us so it was a lot of fun to see the teenager picking those two right away. We could have played this battle in the mid to late 80's with these same mechs and that's a deliberate choice on my part to keep it simple and indulge in a little nostalgia as well. Putting some more hours on these miniatures I painted back in the 80's & 90's is a lot of fun too. 

There has been some talk about running a Mechwarrior campaign for a while now and playing again really woke that up for me. I spent some time last year looking at some different modern to SF RPG systems to find one I thought would work well with it but I have yet to find one I like and think is a great fit. It would probably be Savage Worlds at this point if I was picking today. But, I have come around to just running MW 3rd edition straight-up, allowing us to plug into all of those house supplements for character details. I'm really leaning towards using it for the opening stages of a campaign and determining if it works for us well enough to use it for the rest of the way. More to come on this for sure.

The New Year's Eve Post for 2022

 

Well the end of '22 finds me in a very different place then the end of '21 ... literally. Somewhere along the way I decided to see how much change I could pack into one year and the answer is "a whole lot".

• All of the Apprentices are now out on their own. It's a massive change for all of us but it's part of the deal and how things are supposed to go. 
• I changed jobs, leaving a place I had been for more than a decade for something new. It was time and it has certainly been worth it so far. 
• As that was developing I also ended up moving from a house I had been in for ten years to a new (old) house with more room more land and more interesting terrain. There was the whole looking part, the getting-ready-to-move part, then the actual-moving part, then the unpacking-after-the-move part and trying to get the new routine figured out. It's been challenging but so far so good. One of the reasons for the move was ...
• I made things official and permanent with The Relationship and getting back into the groove of "couple" rather than "individual" has been a big part of this year too. She's amazing and it's very cool to have a smart, capable, person right *there* as we go through life.

So, yeah, had a lot going on this year - mostly positive and mostly self-chosen (or self-inflicted) but still a lot. Next year should be a lot quieter and should involve a lot of building on what we did this year. 

Fred the Yard Panther on patrol

Looking back at this time last year I can safely say I was not planning all of this. I figured it was probably the last "everyone at home" holiday season but beyond that ... no. 

RPG-wise I mostly ran Deadlands. I ran one session of D&D as a sendoff to the game room at the old house and then one session of d6 Star Wars here after other plans fell through. I usually have a more diverse array of games over the course of a year but with everything else going on it just did not happen in 2022. 

In saying farewell to the old place I thought about the number of hours spent in that room with friends and family and it is eye-opening. If you figure two 4-hour sessions a week. 50 weeks a year for ten years (that's a rough guess between RPGs, miniatures, and boardgames)  it means I spent 4000 hours in that room around a table. That's probably on the light side and it doesn't count the time spent building and painting miniatures in an adjoining room which would add at least a couple thousand more hours on to that. It's one way I spend time both with friends and family and also in solo concentration attempting to accomplish various goals. It's a significant chunk of my time and that's probably why I spend time pondering things here. 

I also mentioned 40K last year and while I have yet to play a game in the new place I have started building and painting again. I clear-coated some of those Necrons earlier today and will do some more tomorrow. I also decided to dive back into Age of Sigmar as I unpacked things and I'll talk about that more here next year. 

As far as the next historical game, well, the rules for Victory at Sea arrived today and I'll start reading them a bit later and over the rest of the holiday weekend. No I did nothing really with Flames of War this year. or Kings of War, or Bolt Action, or Armada, but with the new place and a more regular schedule I have hopes of touching at least some of these next year.

Blaster and I did manage to play another round of C&C Ancients this year and we are just about to wrap up the first campaign of Rome vs. Carthage which we started, um, as described in this post. Yeah it's been awhile. To celebrate I picked up the Revolutionary War version of the game to go along with the other 5 or 6 expansions for the Ancient version. Hopefully we can finish it before he starts bringing me grandkids.

One other thing that did hold over from last year is Battletech - yes Battletech! We played multiple games earlier in the year at the old house and we have played multiple sessions at the new place as well. It's been fun dragging old friends into playing it with many comments along the lines of "I haven't played this in 20 years". I expect this will continue at its intermittent pace next year as well as several of them have now bought the current boxed set and started painting mini's. I'm still calling that a win.

So for now my gaming year wraps up with a session of d6 Star Wars that kicked off a campaign, the next-to-last scenario in the C&C Ancients book, and building & painting my Necrons, Chaos Warriors, and Fyreslayers with a pile of rulebooks and settings waiting to be read into the new year. Moving means going through your stuff and for me it reminded me about some things I had let go dormant and rekindled interest in some old options while inspiring some looks at some new ones.

It's been another good year. More to come.