Friday Faction: BattleTech Universe

In 2024, BattleTech is forty years old. Infamously, the game of ‘big, stompy robots’, in the four decades since the original publication of BattleTech: A Game of Armoured Combat by the FASA Corporation in 1984, the miniatures combat game has been expanded with numerous sets of new rules, supplements, several ranges of miniatures—both plastic and metal, over one hundred novels, a cartoon series, a collectible card game, and multiple computer games. What all of these have done—especially the novels—is develop the background and setting, covering a history that begins in the twenty-first century and runs all the way into the thirty-second century. It is detailed, involves multiple factions, hundreds of personalities, and a region of interstellar space surrounding Earth with a radius of roughly five hundred light years. Yet with this wealth of detail comes a complexity which leaves the prospective player to wonder where he should start with the game, which faction should he pick and why, and how did the current situation in the BattleTech universe get to be like it is. These are also questions—and more, that BattleTech Universe addresses and answers.

BattleTech Universe is the key lore book for the BattleTech setting. Published by Catalyst Game Labs, this is a complete history of the Inner Sphere from the theoretical foundations of the Kearny-Fuchida drive in 2018 and the launch of the TAS Pathfinder in 2107 through the Age of War and the Terran Hegemony, the foundation of the Great Houses, to the establishment of the Star League and a golden age. Then with the Amaris Coup, the collapse of the Star League, and the Exodus of the Star League Defence Force under General Aleksandr Kerensky, on through the Succession Wars that threatened a technological collapse into the fourth millennium and thirty-first century, to the Clan Invasion and the devastating onslaught of the invaders’ technologically advanced battlemech designs, the Dark Age that followed a collapse in the interstellar communications network, and ultimately, the capture of Terra by the Clans and the ascension of the ilClan, the one Clan to govern the others. In the process, the book not only provides a history of the BattleTech setting, but also gives a description of the current state of the Inner Sphere.

BattleTech Universe is really a book of two halves, though they are not equal halves. Less than a third of the book, the first half lays the foundation for the longer, second half. The development of the battlemech, the foundation of the Great Houses—Davion, Kurita, Liao Marik, and Steiner—and the four Succession Wars fought to decide which one of them would succeed to the position of First Lord and re-establish the Star League. This includes the development of the technology fundamental to the setting and its neo-feudalism—the battlemech and the pilots who become the new knights of the Inner Sphere. First with the Mackie, and then with its armour and weaponry, including autocannons, lasers, missile launchers, and more. Notable designs are highlighted, such as the Banshee, the Thunderbolt, and Frankenmechs! This groundwork sets everything up for what follows—the conflicts, the intrigues, the clash of personalities, the coming of the Clans, and much, much more. The reason that the second half is both longer and far more detailed is simple. It only covers one-hundred-and-twenty-six years, but these years are when the game is set and when the game’s setting is being developed as an active intellectual property, with events and clashes and stories within the setting that support new supplements and expansions for the game, giving new technologies and battlemech designs for players to deploy, and new battles to fight via new supplements and expansions for the game.

Throughout, BattleTech Universe highlights particular events such as the War of 3039, Operation Revival which saw the invasion of the Inner Sphere in 3049 and the battle of Tukayyid, the Word of Blake Jihad, the foundation of the Second Star League, and their consequences. This is supported by detailed background on the Clans and their culture and their technology, highlighting the radical differences between it and that of the Inner Sphere, and shining a spotlight on the feared Mad Cat battlemech and the baffling use of Elemental Battle Armour. Personalities, such as Victor Steiner-Davion and his resentful sister, Katherine Steiner-Davion, and more up to date with Yori Kurita, Julian Davion, and Danai Liao-Centrella, as well as the ilKhan, Alaric Ward, are given short biographies, including discussion of what motivated them. In between, other aspects of the BattleTech universe are not ignored. Thus, there are sections devoted to the major corporations of the Inner Sphere, the intelligence agencies operated by the Great Houses and other factions, and then, in between, there are maps, the changes in boundaries marking major changes in the history of the Inner Sphere and showing the winners and losers and which faction possesses which worlds.

The last third of BattleTech Universe is devoted to its many factions. Beginning with the five Great Houses, each faction is presented with its history, culture, and goals as well as what its future might be. For each of the eight Clans still existing in 3151, there is a similarly lengthy examination of their history and culture, and then shorter overviews of the twelve Lost Clans. The major kingdoms of the Periphery are given similar treatments, whilst the minor states are given a broad overview. Lastly, the most notable mercenary units are detailed, many of them well known across the Inner Sphere, such as Wolf’s Dragoons, the Gray Death Legion, and the Kell Hounds.

Physically, BattleTech Universe is a coffee table style full of great artwork drawn from the forty years of BattleTech’s publishing history combined with short, easy to digest essays on innumerable subjects. The book is well written, the artwork excellent, and the maps give some scale of the Inner Sphere, but each time they do show a large swathe of occupied space on just a couple of pages. If there is anything missing, it is an index and a bibliography of all of the books that the authors have drawn from for the contents of BattleTech Universe. That might have also helped for any reader wanting to delve deeper into the subject.

BattleTech Universe is an engaging and readable overview of the BattleTech setting and its history. Dedicated fans will probably prefer to delve deep into the supplements and sourcebooks that they have on their bookshelves, but this does not mean they will not enjoy the grand sweep of history presented in its pages, whilst those new to BattleTech will find BattleTech Universe a very useful introduction, readying them for the battlefield.

1984: BattleTech: A Game of Armoured Combat

1974 is an important year for the gaming hobby. It is the year that Dungeons & Dragons was introduced, the original RPG from which all other RPGs would ultimately be derived and the original RPG from which so many computer games would draw for their inspiration. It is fitting that the current owner of the game, Wizards of the Coast, released the new version, Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, in the year of the game’s fortieth anniversary. To celebrate this, Reviews from R’lyeh will be running a series of reviews from the hobby’s anniversary years, thus there will be reviews from 1974, from 1984, from 1994, and from 2004—the thirtieth, twentieth, and tenth anniversaries of the titles. These will be retrospectives, in each case an opportunity to re-appraise interesting titles and true classics decades on from the year of their original release.

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BattleTech infamously began life as BattleDroids. Originally published by FASA Corporation in 1984, for the second edition it would be renamed BattleTech because George Lucas and Lucasfilm claimed the rights to the term ‘droid’. It was also infamously, the game of ‘big, stompy robots’, but as BattleTech, it would go on to be so much more. In the forty years since its publication, this has included numerous expansions to the core board game, even more supplements adding rules and detailing the background to the game, several ranges of miniatures—both plastic and metal, over one hundred novels, a cartoon series, a collectible card game, and multiple computer games. These options have allowed fans to enjoy the setting in numerous ways, sometimes without even playing the core game, but the franchise has always been about the play of the boxed game that is BattleTech. This is a review of the second edition of BattleTech, published in 1985.

BattleTech is a turn-based multiplayer game, played on large maps marked with hexes and terrain with players fielding twelve-metre-tall humanoid armoured, fusion-powered combat units, weighting between ten and a hundred tons, called BattleMechs, or ’mechs. These are not robots, but are controlled by human pilots who will manoeuvre across the battlefield, exchanging fire from lasers, autocannons, missile-launchers, and the dreaded PPC or particle projection cannon. If close enough, they may even punch or kick each other, and if they have jump jets, launch a risky death from above attack. Over the course of a battle, a ’mech will build up heat due to movement and weapons fire, and if it cannot bleed off enough heat, the excess will impair its targeting systems, impede its movement, and potentially cause any ammunition it is carrying to explode or the ’mech to simply shutdown. Each unit is represented by one figure, an illustrated—front and back—cardboard piece that slots into a plastic base, and a record sheet. Each record sheet contains information about the amount of armour a ’mech has, how many weapons, and where the armour and weapons are located, as well as being used to track damage suffered and its location, ammunition used, and how much heat it builds up from one turn to the next.

BattleTech: A Game of Armoured Combat carries the description, “In the 30th century, life is cheap, but BattleMechs aren’t.” The box contains forty-eight playing pieces depicting the various BattleMechs, twenty-four plastic holders for them, one-hundred-and-twenty unit insignias for the game’s various armies and mercenary units, a forty-eight page rulebook, two full-colour card maps, and two six-sided dice. The forty-eight playing pieces are an inch high, whilst the maps measure twenty-two by seventeen inches, are marked in one-and-a-quarter inch-wide hexes, and are both identical. Each hex is roughly a hundred feet across. the game is designed to be played by two or more players, aged twelve and up. The basic unit in the game is a lance of four ’mechs, so with twenty-four plastic holders, it is possible for six players to field a lance each, two players to field three lances each, and so on. It is also possible for a player to control just a single battlemech depending upon the circumstances, such as a duel or a roleplaying situation.

The black and white rulebook covers everything that the players need to know about playing BattleTech. This includes its rules—going from basic training to advanced gunnery, expert and optional rules—as well details of fourteen different ’mechs. These range in size between 20 and 100 tons, and include the Marauder, Phoenix Hawk, Warhammer, Stinger, Locust, and BattleMaster. Many of these are regarded as classics even today, though lawsuits over who owned the rights to use their images, taken from various different Japanese anime, including Dougram, Crusher Joe, and Macross, would result in FASA Corporation withdrawing their original appearances and all art associated artwork from the game. These would be labelled as ‘the unseen’ by BattleTech fans, and were missing from the game for many years until a legal agreement was reached that allowed many of them to return.

The rulebook also contains the setting to BattleTech, which is explained in sidebars which run down each page. The setting is the Inner Sphere, a region of interstellar space surrounding Earth with a radius of roughly five hundred light years. It contains some two thousand settled worlds, reachable by both Faster-Than-Light travel and communication. Beyond the Inner Sphere lies the Periphery. In the thousand years that mankind has had Faster-Than-Light travel, no signs of sentient, alien life have ever been found. In the early thirty-first century, several hundred years after a civil war that saw the collapse of the Star League, the Inner Sphere is dominated by five Great Houses—the Capellan Confederation ruled by House Liao, the Draconis Combine ruled by House Kurita, the Federated Suns ruled by House Davion, the Free Worlds League ruled by House Marik, and the Lyran Commonwealth ruled by House Steiner. Each house claimed the right to be First Lord of the Star League, but none could agree as who was right, and in a series of Succession Wars, the houses have battled each other into technological decline. In that time, the battlemech has remained king of the battlefield, each house fiercely protecting the few battlemech manufacturing facilities each possesses and suffering from a decreasing capacity both to produce new ’mechs and repair them. A battlemech pilot is akin to a knight of old and many ’mechs are handed down through families. The last thing that any pilot wants to suffer is a loss of his mech and his becoming one of the Dispossessed. As well as presenting a history of the Inner Sphere and details of the five great Houses, the rule book also describes numerous mercenary units with their own histories and relationships to the Houses, plus the Bandit Kingdoms of the Periphery.

The background, essentially a ‘feudalist future’, provides reasons and rivalries in what is an age of continual war, that can explain the whys and wherefores of any battles that the players want to stage. If perhaps the rulebook is missing anything, it is some actual scenario ideas that the players can simply set up and play.

In terms of game, the players will roll for initiative and then alternate the movement of their battlemechs. A battlemech can walk, run, or jump—the latter requiring jump jets—which determines how many Movement Points it has to spend on crossing terrain. The terrain can be open or rough ground, cliffs and bluffs, light and heavy woods, and water. The heavier terrain costs more Movement Points to cross. Once movement has been completed, the players take it in turn to declare their attacks for their battlemechs and then roll for the attacks. Battlemechs are equipped with an array of different weapon types and sizes. Lasers can be small, medium, or large; short range missiles launchers fire volleys of two, four, or six missiles; and long-range missile launchers fire volleys of five, ten, or twenty missiles. Plus, there are an autocannon and the PPC. The different weapons have their own ranges, damage inflicted, and heat generated. Rolling to hit is based on the range and is modified by the gunnery skill of a battlemech’s pilot, the movement of both attacker and defender, terrain and cover, and lastly, any ongoing effects of heat for the attacker. The attacking player then rolls the dice, aiming to roll equal to or higher than the target number.

The location of successful hits is determined randomly as the targeting systems of the Inner Sphere are poor. This includes individual missiles for short range missiles, but groups of five for long range missiles. Damage is first deducted from armour in a location and when that is gone, from the internal structure. Critical hits on the hit location roll can bypass armour and automatically do damage to internal structure. Any damage to the internal structure has a chance to inflict damage to weapons or ammunition in a location, to the engine or gyro in the torso, to actuators in the arms and legs, and even the pilot himself on a headshot. Critical hits have severe consequences. Damage to a weapon will destroy it, ammunition will explode causing more damage, damaged actuators and gyro make the battlemech more difficult to operate, a damaged engine will increase its heat output and if it takes more damage cause it to explode and possibly kill the pilot, and head hits can also kill the pilot or knock out an important component. In the meantime, if damage exceeds the amount of internal structure, a leg or arm can fall off or be destroyed. Excess damage can also be transferred to other locations.

Lastly, as well as tracking ammunition use, a player must track the heat a battlemech generates from movement and weapons use as well as damage to the engine. Each battlemech comes with ten heat sinks which will bleed off a certain amount of heat, and more may be fitted, depending upon the design. Excess heat is retained until it is bled off via the heat sinks, meaning that a battlemech will probably need to firer fewer weapons and move a shorter distance to do this. One part of play is thus managing heat from turn to turn. Rushing into an engagement all guns blazing is likely to generate far too much heat, limiting tactical options in subsequent turns. Most battlemechs have an optimal range for its weapons so working within those parameters will also help in heat management. This is in addition to making the best use of the terrain to gain cover or if necessary, standing in the water to work off excess heat!

Rounding out the rulebook are expert rules that allow a battlemech to twist its torso as a reaction to change its firing arc, make physical attacks—including picking up a blown-off limb and using it as a club, charging, and setting fire to the wooded areas. There are also rules for battlemech design, enabling a player to create his own and then test them out on the field of battle. It is just four pages long, and even includes an example, but expands game play in a surprising direction, enabling a player to experiment beyond the fourteen official designs included in the game.

Physically, BattleTech: A Game of Armoured Combat is a good-looking game. It might only use cardboard standees, but they are attractive and they look decent on the very nice maps. The rulebook itself is in black and white and whilst packing a lot of detail into its forty-eight pages is easy to read and understand. This helped by examples of the rules throughout.

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Trever Mendham reviewed Battledroids in ‘Open Box’ in White Dwarf Issue 66 (June 1985). He said, “Overall, this is a well-written, easy-to-understand set of rules. Much of the design is clearly specific to robot combat and succeeds in capturing the flavour of this sort of battle. As it stands, Battledroids is a very good robot combat system, but very little in terms of ‘game’. The production value leads one to expect more.” before awarding it an overall score of seven out of ten.

In The Space Gamer Number 75 (July/August 1985), Aaron Allston reviewed the original game in ‘Featured Review: Battledroids’. His initial reaction was that the game was one of “…[G]iant Japanese robot combat.” and was surprised to discover that it was not, feeling that its “…[F]uture-era “dark age”” was “…[F]leshed out far more than is necessary for a boardgame.” He then said, “But none of it feels like the Japanese cartoons. Rules such as beat buildup and weary campaign background are just wrong for the genre. It’s rather akin to designing a roleplaying game where the characters have superpowers and skintight costumes - and then run about performing political infighting and corporate takeovers a la Dallas or Dynasty. As the Japanese models and cartoons become more common over here, more and more buyers will be purchasing this game expecting something like the source materials, and they’ll be disappointed as I was. They’ll have a decent enough game on their hands – but they may not want to play it.” However, he was more positive in his conclusion: “My recommendation? Buy Battledroids if you'd like a giant-robots boardgame that has nothing to do with the Japanese cartoons. It’s a decent game. You won’t throw away any of your other games to play Battledroids fulltime, but you’ll be adequately entertained.”

BattleTech was reviewed in Adventurer: The Superior Fantasy & Science Fiction Games Magazine Issue #7 (February 1987), alongside the expansions, CityTech, which added urban terrain, infantry, and armour, and AeroTech, which added aerial and space combat. Ashley Watkins made some comparisons between BattleTech and some of the anime titles that were the source material for game and overall, had few reservations, concluding that, “Battletech has a real science fiction flavour, and it’s not often that the elements of playability and background come together in an SF game. So get Citytech for the combat rules, Battletech you want to design your own mechs, Aerotech only if you want the variable geometry mechs, or want to play the space game. This game could well become a cult classic and I highly recommend that you give it a look.”

Dale L. Kemper reviewed BattleTech and CityTech in ‘Game Reviews’ of Different Worlds Issue 45 (March/April 1987). He countered some of the criticism of the game not being Japanese enough by saying, “Battletech surpasses other “Japanese robot”-type games on the market for the simple reason that its universe makes sense. The Battlemech vehicles in the game (many which resemble those from such Japanimation shows as Macross and its Robotec U.S. variant) are piloted military units with strengths and weaknesses. They resemble walking tanks alot more than they resemble the shape-changing robots popularized in the latest cartoons. Certain tactics will aid Mechwarriors in various situations and others will not. Practice and skill outweigh luck in this game.” Before moving on to look at some of the expansions, he concluded that, “All in all Battletech is a good introduction to the universe of the Succession Wars. It should whet your appetite for more and FASA plans on giving it to you. With all the addon games and rules, Battletech will be around for some time to come.” and awarded it three-and-a-half stars.

Steve Wieck reviewed BattleTech in White Wolf Issue #7 (April 1987), continuing the trend of reviewing alongside the supplements Citytech, Aerotech, and MechWarrior. He awarded BattleTech a rating of eight out of ten and said that, “If the true test of any game is its playability, then Battletech is a good system. It is extremely easy to gamemaster and fun to play, at an hourly price that eventually beats the movies.”

Space Gamer/Fantasy Gamer Number 78 (April/May 1987) returned to BattleTech when Scott Tanner asked the question, “Feeling overwhelmed by the number of products for mechwarrior gaming? Here’s a survey of FASA Corps. BATTLETECH products.” in ‘Infotech on BATTLETECH’. He concluded his description of the core game with, “Battletech is a good game which stands on its own, but lacks in two important areas which the next two supplements cover; warfare in an urban environment and air combat.” The article also contained descriptions of CityTech, AeroTech, and MechWarrior.

Battletech was reviewd in ‘Role-Playing Reviews: Tickets to the stars’ in Dragon Magazine Issue #131 (March 1988) by Jim Bambra alongside the MechWarrior roleplaying game. He said, “The BATTLETECH game is a brilliantly conceived and presented game of robotic combat set in the war-torn universe of the Successor States.” before concluding about the game, “The BATTLETECH game system requires tactical thinking and detailed combat resolution, without becoming too mechanically complicated. Add in the background which appears in sidebars throughout the book, and you have a very good game rich in depth and technical information.”

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It is interesting to note that despite being a wargame, BattleTech has remained closely associated with the roleplaying hobby rather than the wargaming hobby. This can be attributed to a number of factors, such as its set-up of fighting with what are effectively giant robots not being a traditional subject matter for wargames—at least not in 1984, it being published by a roleplaying publisher, adverts for it being carried in roleplaying magazines, and for it being supported by a long running series of well-regarded fiction—at least within the hobby. Of course, BattleTech did have its own roleplaying game in the form of MechWarrior, but it has never been as popular as the core game and gained little traction outside of fans of BattleTech. Ultimately, for whatever reason, BattleTech has always been accepted alongside the roleplaying hobby rather than rejected by it.

From the basis of BattleTech: A Game of Armoured Combat has spawned a rich and detailed setting supported by numerous games and editions, as well as miniatures and more, but what has made the BattleTech franchise what it is today has to start somewhere. Returning to the original game and there is a pleasing elegance to BattleTech: A Game of Armoured Combat that is easy to grasp and play. What you might play is another matter, for whilst the background is excellent, the issue with it is that not much is made of it in the rule book. There are no scenarios or suggested battles and had there been, they would have drawn the players into the game and setting. That said, there are hooks here and there in the background that can be developed in scenario set-ups, especially in the descriptions of the mercenary units and the bandit kingdoms. BattleTech: A Game of Armoured Combat is still a very playable and enjoyable game with flavoursome combat and a good background.

Magazine Madness 30: Parallel Worlds Issue #06

The gaming magazine is dead. After all, when was the last time that you were able to purchase a gaming magazine at your nearest newsagent? Games Workshop’s White Dwarf is of course the exception, but it has been over a decade since Dragon appeared in print. However, in more recent times, the hobby has found other means to bring the magazine format to the market. Digitally, of course, but publishers have also created their own in-house titles and sold them direct or through distribution. Another vehicle has been Kickstarter.com, which has allowed amateurs to write, create, fund, and publish titles of their own, much like the fanzines of Kickstarter’s ZineQuest. The resulting titles are not fanzines though, being longer, tackling broader subject matters, and more professional in terms of their layout and design.

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The sixth issue—and it is the sixth issue and not the correctly numbered fifth issue—of Parallel Worlds was published in February 2020. As with previous issues, it contains no gaming content as such, but rather discusses and aspects of not just the hobby, but different hobbies—board games, roleplaying games, computer games, films, and more. Previous issues placed an emphasis on everything else—books and films in particular—rather than gaming, and although that emphasis remains, with Parallel Worlds Issue #5, the magazine began to strive for a more balanced mix of content. It also became better organised, continuing the colour-coding of the various sections, so that the issue’s interviews are together and its tabletop content is together, but just arranging the order of articles in different sections so that they flow thematically from one into the other and so give a touch of continuity in places. The articles also got more interesting and informative, resulting on a far more readable issue which covered horror and Science Fiction, roleplaying communities, films and books and computer games. In the case of Parallel Worlds Issue #5, this countered the issue that the magazine does not support the tabletop gaming hobby very well. This continues with Parallel Worlds Issue #6, which has a Science Fiction theme.

Parallel Worlds Issue #6 opens with the first interview in the issue. This is by Marc Cross with the leaders of ‘South London Warlords’, the long-running wargames club. This is part of the ‘Know Your Community’ strand, highlighting communities dedicated to tabletop gaming. In the case of the South London Warlords, it highlights their activities in making the hobby of wargaming a welcoming one, and in particular, the staging of Salute, the one-day wargaming event. At the time of the review, both it and the club have been running for fifty years, and this interview was nicely timed before the then next event. The wargaming strand continues with Rob Sawyer’s ‘BattleTech – Faster, My Giant Stompy Robot’. Written and published to coincide with the release of the computer game, MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, this gives a history and overview of the now forty-year-old intellectual property which developed from the single robot combat game into a franchise that has supported numerous board and miniatures games and supplements and sourcebooks for both, collectible miniatures games, collectible card game, over one hundred novels, numerous computer games, and a Saturday morning cartoon. The lengthiest piece in the magazine, it is not wholly comprehensive, since it really only explores the original situation in the Successor States, that detailed in the original boxed set and supplements that followed, rather than the later period with the coming of the Clans and subsequent events. Nevertheless, it provides a very good introduction to the setting and even includes one or two facts that that are new to this longtime BattleTech fan.

If ‘BattleTech – Faster, My Giant Stompy Robot’ is relevant today because 2024 is the fortieth anniversary of Battletech, Chris Cunliffe’s ‘Play Safe’ is equally as relevant today because it explores the still topical issues of how to handle consent at the table in roleplaying. He makes the point that as roleplaying games have evolved and focused more on story in the last few decades, it has been accompanied by more mature and more difficult content that not every player would want to see included in what is their play. As a response, there has been a rise in the number of safety tools available which a Game Master and her players can deploy to establish the subjects and areas that they do not want to experience or explore. The X-Card is perhaps the most well-known, but not the earliest and not the most nuanced. The earliest perhaps are the ‘Lines and Veils’ introduced by Ron Edwards in 2004 in Sex and Sorcery, a supplement for the Sorcerer roleplaying game, so they date back two decades now in 2024. However, there are issues with those too, and consequently Cunliffe explores other options as well. In the process, he provides the reader with a range of choices so that he can decide which one toolset works best for him and the rest of his group. This is a solid introduction to the subject and very useful.

Christopher Jarvis’ review of the board game Lifeform is decent, but given the fact that it is inspired by the film Alien, feels as it should have been reviewed in Parallel Worlds Issue #5. The ‘Mini of the Month’, this time written by Angus McNicholl about an Authorised Bounty Hunter miniature sculpted and manufactured by Corvus Belli for the Infinity Science Fiction skirmish game, continues be an uninteresting space filler. At worst, it could be reduced to a single page in future issues, at best, it could be cancelled as a regular feature and its space devoted to almost anything else that would undoubtedly be actually interesting.

The first of two Thinkpiece articles in Parallel Worlds Issue #6 looks at the lack of female representation in various media, primarily genre media. ‘Creative Equality’ by Jane Clewett and Ben Potts looks at their role in Science Fiction, fantasy, and horror, how they have broken ground, like Mary Shelley with Frankenstein or Shirly Jackson with The Haunting of Hill House, but progress in their representation has been limited, despite for example, female writers having won the Hugo award for best novel several times in the last few years. The same situation applies in video games too, with more video game protagonists being male than female still despite the greater number of players being female. It is a disappointing article to read and a pity that Parallel Worlds is not around today to return to the subject to assess the situation four years on.

The second Thinkpiece connects to the first piece on TV & Film. In the Thinkpiece, ‘Think Bigger: Megastructures’, Thomas Turnball-Ross explores the history of the megastructure in Science Fiction, which of course, began with Larry Niven’s Ringworld. Since then, megastructures have been a feature of the Halo series of computer games, films such as Pixar’s WALL-E, and more. Not just ringworlds, but also Dyson Spheres, arks, and the Stanford torus. Numerous different media are mentioned here, such as Ian M Banks’ Consider Phlebas and Elite Dangerous, but you wish that each was given a clear and proper illustration so that the reader has some idea of what they look like. Otherwise, this is a serviceable introduction to what it describes as a civilisation’s ultimate manifestation. Indeed, one of the tropes in Science Fiction for megastructures is for them to have been abandoned and the identity of the builders lost, but rediscovered as part of their exploration. That goes all the way back again, to Niven’s Ringworld. This is a companion piece to Allen Stroud’s ‘The Big Dumb Object’ from Parallel Worlds Issue #5, and there is some crossover between the two.

There is another purpose for the megastructure discussed in the following article by Jane Clewett. In ‘Why Watch… Babylon 5?’, she asks whether one of the biggest Science Fiction television series of the nineteen nineties worth watching after almost three decades since it was first broadcast. The series really was groundbreaking in terms of its characters, the sweep of its plot and character story arcs, the presentations of its alien species, and the use of computers to create its special effects. The latter look dated now, as does its attitude to LGBT issues, but then that was not its fault and it did at least hint at their inclusion. So that is not really a fair criticism. The megastructure in the series is Babylon 5 itself , a giant space station built to facilitate and foster peace between the galactic powers, and is a character in part itself. The article does a good job of selling the series and making clear that it is worth checking to see if the potential watcher will enjoy it.

The ‘TV & Film’ articles in the issue continue the discussion pieces of ‘Let’s Talk About... The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance’ from Parallel Worlds Issue #03, ‘Let’s Talk About... Ad Astra’ from Parallel Worlds Issue #04, and ‘Let’s Talk About... Joker’ ‘from Parallel Worlds Issue #05. Those articles were two-handers, but in Parallel Worlds Issue #06, it becomes a three-hander between Allen Stroud, Ben Potts, and Jane Clewett. Together, they discuss Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Numerous controversaries have been and gone since the release of the third and final part of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, so the divisive nature of this film—and the trilogy in general, has faded into memory. So it is interesting to return to the divided opinions prevalent at the time and see them discussed in a courteous and enjoyable manner. Each of the three contributors has a very different opinion.

For the books strand, Connor Eddles provides a solid overview and history of the Amazing Stories pulp Science Fiction magazine in ‘Pulp Pioneers’, Ant Jones reviews The Blackbird and the Ghots and Catching Light in ‘Self-Pub Review’, and Jane Clewett delves into ‘the luminaries – chose your social media adventure’. The first two of these are quick and breezy, whereas the third uses Susan Dennard’s The Luminaries, a six-month long adventure presented via a series of choices on Twitter to direct the story, as a springboard to examine the state of interactive fiction. This covers books like the Fighting Fantasy series and television programme such as Black Books’ ‘Bandersnatch’, before ultimately returning to the starting point, unsure of whether the publication of the original ‘choose your own adventure’ story will work in print as well as it did online.

Tom Grundy’s review of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin follows, whilst in ‘The Mysterious Case of Dentra Rast’, Allen Stroud returns to the fiction he wrote at the time of his work on the Elite Dangerous Roleplaying Game involving the character Dentra Rast and see what happened next. What did happen took place in another game all together, EVE Online, and is quite surprising. An interesting article for fans of both computer games. Lastly, the issue is rounded out with a short story also by Allen Stroud, ‘Lost at the Wedding’, which is quite enjoyable.

Physically, Parallel Worlds Issue #6 is cleanly and tidily presented, and on the whole, it is a bright and breezy affair. Unlike in previous issues, there is less of the stretching of the content to fit the pages, so the magazine feels fuller and tighter. However, that does not apply to ‘Mini of the Month’.

Parallel Worlds Issue #6 has a lot of enjoyable and interesting content benefiting from its strong Science Fiction theme, in particular the article on BattleTech and safety in gaming stand out. The latter in particular, feels timely and actually connected and relevant to the gaming hobby, something that gaming articles in previous issues did not usually achieve. Overall, Parallel Worlds Issue #6 continues the improvement begun in Parallel Worlds Issue #5 and it is beginning to become a magazine that you want to read.

A BattleTech Starter

BattleTech is thirty-five years old. Originally called BattleDroids, in the decades since, BattleTech, both as a game and a setting has been supported by numerous games and expansions, miniatures and rulesets, a collectible card game and a television series, computer games and novels. At its heart though is BattleTech the game, a game of combat fought between humanoid bipedal robots, each standing between seven and seventeen meters tall, massing between twenty and one-hundred tonnes, and armed with a mix of weaponry including lasers, particle projection cannons, autocannons, and missile launchers. In combat, pilots will manoeuvre around each other and through various types of terrain to get the best shot, to first destroy armour, and then weapons and other parts of the battlemech with internal damage. It is not just a matter of blazing with all weapons, for every action a battlemech takes in terms of movement and firing weapons, generates heat. Generate too much heat and a battlemech’s fusion engine will shut down or even explode. Fortunately, every battlemech is fitted with several heatsinks which bleed off the heat generated through battle, but a mechwarrior—and thus the player—will still need to manage his battlemech’s heat to fight efficiently on the battlefield.

BattleTech is a roughly 1/285 scale wargame played out on a hex-map, between two or more players, aged twelve and up. Each player can control just the one battlemech, but games are typically played with each side fielding one or more lances, each consisting of four battlemechs, at a skirmish level. Other games and expansions added armour and other vehicles, infantry, air and space assets, and increased the scale of the conflict, but the core of the game is still about battlemechs.

The setting for BattleTech is the Inner Sphere in the thirty-first century. Humanity has developed a means of Faster-Than-Light travel and settled some two thousand worlds within a radius of about five hundred light years of Terra. Although mankind established the Star League as a governing interstellar council, its collapse led to centuries of warfare between five great houses—the Free Worlds League, the Federated Suns, the Draconis Combine, the Lyran Commonwealth, and the Capellan Confederation--that continue to its day. The ongoing series of conflicts, known as the Succession Wars, has led to a loss of technology and limited advances in terms of science and technology, though there are rumours of caches of Star League technology and knowledge still to be found. Players typically field units serving one of these great houses, but they can also field mercenary units which sign contracts with the great houses. There is even scope for players to create and field their own mercenary units and whole campaigns can played around them. Essentially, BattleTech is a wargame set in a militarised Science Fiction universe involving futuristic weaponry and multiple factions, which despite having the feel of Space Opera in its storyline, is quite hard in terms of its Science Fiction.

Originally published and developed by FASA, it is currently published by Catalyst Game Labs who in order to celebrate its thirty-Fifth anniversary have released a new edition of the game, starting with the BattleTech Beginner Box. This is designed as an introduction to the game and the setting for two players aged twelve and up—though there is the capacity for as many as four to play. Skirmishes can be fought between single battlemechs and between lances of battlemechs if there are just two players, or with a player controlling one or two battlemechs each if there are four players.

The BattleTech Beginner Box is a light, but sturdy package illustrated with an eye-catching picture of a battlemech in action. Inside the contents are divided by a deep plastic insert. On top, the first things that catch your eye are the two grey plastic miniatures, assembled, but not painted, both ready to bring to the battlefield. These are of a Griffin and a Wolverine respectively, both medium battlemechs. Alongside them are the novela, ‘Golden Rule’, a set of eight record sheets, four pilot cards, and two six-sided dice. Below the tray is a small punchboard of additional BattleMechs and terrain, one double-sided map, a rulebook, and a Universe Primer.

‘Golden Rule’ is written by William H. Keith, the author of Decision at Thunder Rift, the first BattleTech novel published in 1986. Where the novel was set in the year 3024 and told the story of Grayson Carlyle’s attempts to resurrect his father’s mercenary regiment and following its destruction at the hands of pirates, ‘Golden Rule’ takes place in 2290 and concerns a mission undertaken by Grayson’s father when he was serving with Colby’s Commandos. It is an entertaining introduction to the setting and the type of situations that might be encountered in a BattleTech game. Although it comes to a natural pause, it is not complete. The reader will need to purchase BattleTech: A Game of Armored Combat boxed set, the full rules for the game and continue reading it there. Overall, it is nice to see Keith return to write a piece of introductory fiction just as he did over three decades ago.

The eight full-colour record sheets provide the full stats—’mech data, including Movement Points, weapon stats and location, and armour arrangement—along with an illustration. Full write-ups are given on the other side of many, whilst others have illustrations from the setting. The write-ups will be familiar from the game’s technical readouts. The battlemechs include a Locust LCT-1V, a Wolverine WVR-6R, a Locust LCT-1E, a Wolverine WVR-6M, a Griffin GRF-1N, a Thunderbolt TDR-5S, a Griffin GRF-1S, and a Thunderbolt TDR-5SE. This is a good mix of design types and the background on the reverse side adds plenty of flavour and detail to support the stats. The four pilot cards are also done in full colour and are double-sided. Each describes a pilot and his or her background as well as indicating which battlemech they pilot and a special ability or two. For example, Lance Sergeant Jia Yawen is the pilot of a Thunderbolt who has the ‘Sandblaster’ and ‘Weapon Specialist (Large Laser)’ special abilities. The first grants a bonus when determining the number of LRM (long range missiles) missiles that hit in clusters with a successful hit, the latter grant a ‘to-hit’ bonus when firing a large laser. The dice are a pair of plain white six-sided dice.

The punchboard contains eight battlemech standees which match the eight record sheets as well as seven pieces of terrain, both light and heavy and of varying size, which can be added to the maps provided in the BattleTech Beginner Box to modify the terrain. The map sheet itself measures 18” by 22” and is marked in 2¼” hexes. One side depicts arid terrain marked with the occasional stand of trees, whilst the other side shows grassland broken up with more forested areas.

Below this are the BattleTech Beginner Box Quick-Start Rules and An Instant Guide to the Inner Sphere, both of which are done in full colour. The BattleTech Beginner Box Quick-Start Rules provide the rules to play with plenty of examples and some simple scenarios as reference tables on the back page in just twelve pages. The ‘An Instant Guide to the Inner Sphere’ is just four pages in length and details the five great houses involved in the ongoing Succession Wars as well as Comstar, the quasi-religious organisation which provides Faster-Than-Light communication across the Inner Sphere. Description of both battlemechs and mechwarriors are also included. It is perhaps a bit basic and does not really provide much in the way of the setting’s flavour—the pilot cards, the battlemech descriptions, and the novella all do a better job of that.

The rules themselves cover initiative, movement, and attacking with everything rolled on the two dice as needed. Whichever side wins the initiative goes second, allowing them to react to the actions of the loser. Each side then takes it in turn to move their battlemechs, each having a different number of Movement Points depending upon whether a battlemech is walking, running, or jumping. Movement is done hex by hex, Movement Points being paid to enter a hex—the heavier and more difficult the terrain, the greater the cost—and to change facing. Once movement is done, attacks can take place. This is done by taking the attacking pilot’s Gunnery skill and adding modifiers for his movement, the target’s movement, any intervening terrain, and range. This generates a number between two and twelve. If the roll is equal to the number or over, then the attack is successful. Hit location is then determined randomly and damage applied.

Included in the Quick-Start Rules are a few simple scenarios. These go from from one-on-one battles to adding terrain and additional battlemechs and a pair of battlemechs attempting to break out from behind enemy lines. There is some variation here, especially in mixing and matching the battlemechs fielded against each other. An experienced wargamer will probably be able to add more, but players new to the game and the hobby may have greater difficulty.

Overall, the rules are clear and easy to understand, and ably supported by some good examples. That said there are a couple issues with both them and the BattleTech Beginner Box. One is the use of the dice. The rules suggest using black, red, and hite dice to indicate the type of movement each battlemech has made on a turn, but there are just a pair of white dice in the box. This is obviously not enough. Now of course, dice are expensive and would have added to the cost of the set, but some movement tokens could have been included by increasing the size of the punchboard. The issue is what the rules do not cover and this is quite a lot in terms of BattleTech as a game. This includes piloting skills, critical hits, additional terrain, firing arcs and attack direction, more weapons and equipment, and so on… Again, to be fair, the BattleTech Beginner Box introduces the game’s rules, but arguably, some of these are so integral to the game of BattleTech—the rules for heat in particular—it would have nice to have seen them included in some advanced rules. 

From the design of a starter set or a beginner box, the BattleTech Beginner Box does also miss a trick. There is no, ‘What’s in this box’ sheet, explaining the box’s content and pointing out where start. There is a description of the box’s content in the Quick-Start Rules, but that is probably the sixth or seventh thing someone opening the box is going to look at, and even then, really only when they sit down to read the rules.

Physically, the BattleTech Beginner Box is an attractive box, well presented, the rules clearly written, and nicely illustrated. It is though, too basic a game for anyone with any experience with wargames and definitely too basic for anyone who has played BattleTech before. They will probably want to go straight onto BattleTech: A Game of Armored Combat. Nevertheless, BattleTech Beginner Box is still a good introduction to both the rules and the setting, decently priced, and attractive.

BattleTech at Twenty Five

When it comes to the gaming hobby, BattleTech is unique. Originally appearing as a table top game of piloted robot combat in 1984, successive publishers – first FASA, then FanPro LLC and WizKids, and now Catalyst Game Labs – have developed that game and its setting of the Inner Sphere into a Science Fiction franchise that has supported multiple board and miniature games with even more supplements and source books, numerous computer games, a television cartoon series, a collectible miniatures game, a role playing game, and novels galore. All of which revolved around battles fought between battlemechs, the giant walking combat machines that range in size from twenty to a hundred tonnes and are armed with weapons that include machine guns, lasers, missiles, auto cannons, and particle projector cannons. Over the years innumerable designs and their variants of battlemech have appeared on paper, and as miniatures in varying scales. Indeed, the fact that players could design their own battlemechs and field them against those official to the setting has always been a selling point.

I have been along for the ride for most of that time. I have played many of the BattleTech board games, played it as a miniatures game and played the collectable miniatures games, played a few of the computer games, have some of the official patches, got all of the toys based on the television series, done a little playtesting, and read just about every Classic BattleTech novel right from the start. You will probably not be surprised to hear that I even have reviewed a BattleTech gaming supplement here and there. In truth and as much as I enjoyed playing BattleTech, I was never and am not a great player of the game, and I liked reading the fiction set in the Inner Sphere more than I did playing in that setting. Plus, as clever a design as WizKids’ MechWarrior: Dark Ages was, it never quite grabbed me, let alone the fact that I am not necessarily a fan of anything that comes with the tag, “collectible.” Nevertheless, I was more than pleased to see Catalyst Game Labs release a coffee table style volume celebrating the franchise’s silver anniversary.

Indeed, so were a lot of people, for BattleTech: 25 Years of Art & Fiction won the 2010 Origins Award for Best Game Related Book. As befitting the coffee table style format, this is a very attractive looking book, its white text laid out on matt black pages throughout. Art taken from the franchise’s history appears on every page, the majority of it in full colour, but there is plenty of black and white also. Besides the artwork, the book contains an introduction to both BattleTech and the Inner Sphere; a complete timeline from the twenty-first century to the thirty-second; presentations of every licensed aspect to the franchise, from cloth patches to toys; a complete guide to the BattleTech computer games; a bibliography of every game and book released for the franchise between 1984 and 2009; and of course, eighteen new pieces of short fiction, written by some of the franchise’s best known authors, including Robert Charrette, Loren L. Coleman, William H. Keith, and Michael A. Stackpole.

The fiction ranges back and forth across the BattleTech timeline, with stories set during the era of the Star League, the Succession Wars, and the Clan Invasion as well as at the end of setting’s history with the fall of the Republic of the Sphere, and the BattleTech universe, with stories set in the Inner Sphere, on the Periphery, and on the home worlds of the Clans. Several allow authors to revisit characters previously seen in the classic novels, such as Victor Milan’s Cassie Suthorn of Comacho’s Caballeros (originally seen in 1994’s Close Quarters) in the story, “Ozymandias;” and the freeborn Clan warrior, Horse, who fought alongside the Clan Jade Falcon hero, Aidan Pryde (as described in Robert Thurston’s The Jade Phoenix Trilogy), here appears in his last days in the story, “Face in the Viewport.” Surprisingly, few of BattleTech’s major figures appear in these tales, the notable exceptions being Anastasius Focht, Precentor Martial of Comstar and first envoy the Clans prior to their invasion of the Inner Sphere, and Victor Davion, once head of the Federated Commonwealth, and later, Focht’s successor. Here Focht appears in Loren L. Coleman’s “Means to an End,” dealing with a potential assassination attempt on Tharkad, whilst in “Well Met The Future,” Michael A. Stackpole tells us of Victor Davion’s first encounter with the future Exarch of the Republic of the Sphere, Devlin Stone.

The fiction certainly captures the broad swath of the setting, from major political figures down to ordinary mechwarriors, from infantry combat up to planetary assault by Star League era battleships. The stories are snapshots of each aspect of the setting, but sometimes the lack in terms of both context and the wider picture leave the reader none the wiser. Perhaps the best of the stories comes late in Classic Battletech’s history during the period of the Jihad launched by the Word of Blake. Blaine Lee Pardoe’s “The Walking Dead” tells of a poisoned, yet noble sacrifice by warriors of Clan Smoke Jaguar, while “Teach the Wicked” by Phaedra Weldon explains the mournful strike at a reviled figure in the Word of Blake. Lastly, Keith R. A. DeCandido’s “Three Sides to Every Story” neatly captures the use and misuse of information in the Inner Sphere.

Inserted between each story are more pieces of artwork as well as two page spreads that showcase other aspects of the franchise, such as the mechwarrior known as the Black Widow, Natasha Kerensky, and the various types of battle armour. Once the fiction ends, BattleTech: 25 Years of Art & Fiction takes on a more bibliographical function, covering everything from the computer games, Battletech Virtual World, and the patches to the fiction, sourcebooks, comics, and magazines. Apart from the listings for the fiction, games, and sourcebooks – complete up until time of publication in 2009 – this is not a complete bibliography, but again more of a retrospective. Nevertheless, having the listings for the fiction, games, and sourcebooks in one place is handy, and there is a certain pleasure in noting what you have on them.

As attractive a book as BattleTech: 25 Years of Art & Fiction is, it is not quite perfect. Several of the pieces of fiction need another edit, while it would also have been useful if the book had included more than the one map of the Inner Sphere. The only included map is from the thirty-second century, the period of the Republic of the Sphere, and the setting for the MechWarrior: Dark Age collectible miniatures game. Given the book’s focus on the history of BattleTech, both in game and as a game, it would have been nice if maps had been included that covered most of the Inner Sphere’s history, especially as every period of the setting is gamed by someone. Similarly it would have been a nice touch if it was stated what each piece depicted rather just the book it was used for and its artist. Some of the art is obvious, but not all of it. Also, whilst it was great to read the detail given to BattleTech’s computer games, some background could equally been given to other aspects of the franchise.

Of course, it is the artwork that is the highlight of BattleTech: 25 Years of Art & Fiction. The book contains hundreds of pieces of artwork, much of it capturing the battlemech in all of its fearsome glory and blazing action. Unsurprisingly, the most commonly depicted battlemechs are those signature to the BattleTech setting – the Madcat, the Loki, the Atlas, the Vulture, and so on, appear again and again. Part of the pleasure of seeing this artwork is not just seeing again, but in seeing it divorced of its original appearance and thus free of any text and logos that go with a trade dress.

There are explanatory elements within BattleTech: 25 Years of Art & Fiction that make it suited for use as an introduction to the BattleTech universe. It is not quite that though, there being just not enough of a contextual explanation for much of the franchise’s myriad elements. So it is much more of a look back that those in the know, the devoted fans, will appreciate and understand. Nevertheless, BattleTech: 25 Years of Art & Fiction is a very attractive retrospective of the game that has pulled me back into the setting and make me want to play – however bad I am going to be.