I've been busily painting away today but I find myself having a bit of a ponder on the possibility of gaming further in the Battletech universe but in different scales and with different rules.
I've really enjoyed the setting and am keen to explore it more, be it the earlier stuff or a revamped version of my own.
Almost at random, I settled on initially having the action set in the Magistracy of Canopus, one of the larger of the Periphery states. Reading through the background, I'm struck by how interesting the writing is as the whole of the Periphery is pretty much a backward wasteland following two centuries of almost constant warfare and as such the military units of said state are struggling to rebuild and protect their planets at the same time.
Canopian Space
This is part of the reason that the Canopians have hired the rather down at heel mercenaries Wilson's Hussars who have thus far done a steady job of protecting their new factory at Rynn's Steading.
I'm planning on building some small scale gubbins to give me some skirmish possibilities featuring espionage and skulduggery as the Canopians try to acquire new tech from nearby Inner Sphere states and other Periphery powers seek to disrupt them. With this in mind, I'm looking at putting together some small space ships too as I quite like the idea of skirmishes with free traders, pirates and other bits and bobs.
We shall see how it goes but I am really impressed with the sheer breadth and depth of the background that Battletech has developed over the last thirty odd years and am surprised more folks haven't explored it.
Hopefully tomorrow will see the last of the Pirate lance finished and then I want to finish off my Canopian vehicle lance and then finally get the infantry put together!
I seem to be slowly ramping up to a bit of a long term campaign featuring a number of different elements all tying into an overall narrative. For the short term, I think there's going to be more Papertech stuff but I hope I'll get more of my assorted random sculpts put together.
In the meantime, All the best!
The amount of background is pretty hard to penetrate in Battletech in my opinion. There doesn't even seem to be a 'great' place to start, it seems like you have to make some ill informed decisions about what era you are interested in before you can even begin to dig in/narrow down.
ReplyDeleteI have to say that the most recent battletech game was sorta fun operating on the edge of the magistocracy, taurian hegemony, and brought in a new minor power. I believe they may have made a source book for it too.
All too true!
DeleteThere is a vast quantity of game books, novels, computer games and time periods to choose from and Battletech does seem to have always suffered from the writers need to try and cram as much as possible into each book making them rather dense and at times impenetrable.
I found the original house sourcebooks handy as each concentrate on a different great house, the Periphery and Comstar and only go up to about 3030.
They give an overview of each with personalities, military formations, industries and whatnot which I found really useful.
As tempting as it is to go for the Clan invasion or one of the Succession Wars, I went for a somewhat more peaceful period of 3020 and set the action in the Periphery as while there is plenty of options to play around with low level conflicts such as raids and stuff, there's less overwhelming events and massive battles to worry about. It also allows me to concentrate on fairly small forces.
I may move things forward in the timeline at some point but I think I'd want to build my collection of sculpts a fair amount first.
Ideally I think I'd like to have a lance of Mechs, some vehicles and an Aerospace fighter for each of the great powers eventually as well as some of the minor forces too but that is a long term goal.
I also plan on working in my own version of the setting, using elements that I like and incorporating stuff from other settings that I can use to make my version more interesting.
We shall see how things go and I hope to keep posting more stuff involving the project!