Till from my bones my flesh be hacked

 So what changed?

In October of 2019 an ad swooped across Facebook. An Atlas stared bleakly out of the screen.  "Battletech," it said, "$12 on Humble Bundle."  I pulled the trigger and gave the game a spin.

I was surprised how much of the information I had retained, just from looking at the ad.  "Oooh that is an Atlas.  It has an AC20," I thought.

I actually had the put the game to the side for about a month after first trying it while a bug where nothing but fire-starters would spawn was patched.  The game itself is really good, but as I played it I thought it was less a faithful adaptation of Battletech and more a really good turned based strategy game set in the Battletech universe.  And this difference renewed my interest in the Battletech table-top game.  I began googling things, and eventually found sarna, the online Battletech encyclopedia.  I lost interest in Battletech right when the FedCom Civil War was starting, so I had a lot of caught to do.

Then a global pandemic broke out...

"Redeeming" the Inner Sphere

In my previous post, I mentioned that the setting was too mature for me when I was in middle school.  That shouldn't be a surprise really, if you move from the children's cartoon series straight to the Jade Phoenix trilogy there is going to be some whiplash.

What I didn't know then, but understand now is that the Battletech fiction was designed to set up further game play, and if it happened to tell a human story in the meantime that's fine.  The point of The Jade Phoenix cycle is that the Clans are a brutal, despotic, culture.  One that was designed to place the most cruel and barbaric people at the very top.  That clan "honor" is the veil which, when draped over the brutality keeps their society from collapsing even as it fails to address the underlying brutality.  That didn't come through when you read it in 7th grade though.

The other thing about The Clans is how neatly their system of combat maps on top of the table-top game.  The clans exist to set up more game play.  The duels and batchalls all lead up to five pristine mechs meeting on 2 connected map sheets.

The earliest descriptions of the Inner Sphere setting--a sort of Mad Max style dystopia--were supposed set up game play as well.  Distant leaders were sending mechwarriors to fight over some planet they had no stake in, all because of some centuries old animus they held toward a rival distant ruler.  That's a good set up for game play.  But the moment you start to tell a story in that world it starts to break down.  All of the sudden the distant rulers aren't so distant.  The narration takes you into their thoughts and motivations.

To be a viable product Battletech has to prioritize game play.  It cannot let its fictional characters get in the way of that.  This is why factions always have to come back from the dead.  Why every victory has to be temporary.[1] The Battletech setting demands a status quo.  All fiction, scifi or not, requires real change and development.

Anyway, that's just a long winded way of saying that having the Gray Death Legion and Clan Smoke Jaguar come back from oblivion is kind of b.s.

It's my experience, and I'll admit here it's limited, that any piece of battletech storytelling that isn't highly critical of the battletech setting (say as a Jake Phoenix style take down of clan culture) or doesn't have an explicit anti-war themes is kind of dull.  Honestly, I'm thinking of every Battletech author who sets out to write a great man of history story.[2]  It makes sense in a slightly more black-and-white[3] moral background.  In a stagnant world, the "great men" are part of the problem.  They achieve nothing, but somehow get lauded for it.  Their men die, their enemies die.  Everyone dies.  So what?

The Battletech fiction is where my knowledge is the weakest.  Are there important counter-examples I overlooked?  Let me know in the comments.

Pendulum of the Sphere

What accounts for Battletech's return?

Cultural critics have noticed that nostalgia seems to follow 30 year cycles.  Writing on The Pattering, Patrick Metzger notes that "it takes about 30 years for a critical mass of people who were consumers of culture when they were young to become the creators of culture in their adulthood."  That would explain the renewed interest in Battletech has been seeing.

But the re-emergance of interest in Battletech might go deeper than that.  Psychologically, humans are predisposed to prioritize the memories they have of their teen years.

Interestingly enough, the steady resets of the Battletech setting form a sort of nostalgic pendulum themselves.  First it's the Terran Hegemony.  Then the WoB Militia.  Then the Republic of the Sphere. Then (I suppose) the Ilclan.  A baseline that any deviation eventually return to.

A few months after I found myself interested in the game again I bought a copy of Operational Turning Points:  Hanseatic Crusade.  The campaign looks quite interesting and I hope to play it once I find a good group of people to try it with.  But I was surprised to learn that it just deals with a clan invading the Hanseatic League.  Given that we were about a year away from the Ilclan, and that Clan Goliath Scorpion found a bunch of Star League technology out there in an even deeper part of the periphery, I thought to myself, "is this really a story that need to be told? Haven't we been here already?"  But nostalgia is a pendulum, and it was swinging back in the direction of clans vs Inner Sphere.[4]

Just a reminder that I am moderating any comments left on the blog to death

[1] I'm looking at you, Victor Stiener-Davion!
[2] Let me be clear, morally black-and-white stories have their place.  Star Trek anyone?
[3] I guess this is why strategic tier Battletech game play never took off?
[4] I am going to get to planning/playing War Journal: Luzerne soon, I promise.  I have maybe one more set-up post to make.  Don't worry.  We'll get there.