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.

The Myconid Mile

The Long Hard Mile: A Solo Adventure is a scenario for Metamorphosis Alpha: Fantastic Role-Playing Game of Science Fiction Adventures on a Lost Starship. The first Science Fiction roleplaying game and the first post-apocalypse roleplaying game, Metamorphosis Alpha is set aboard the Starship Warden, a generation spaceship which has suffered an unknown catastrophic event which killed the crew and most of the million or so colonists and left the ship irradiated and many of the survivors and the flora and fauna aboard mutated. Some three centuries later, as Humans, Mutated Humans, Mutated Animals, and Mutated Plants, the Player Characters, knowing nothing of their captive universe, would leave their village to explore strange realm around them, wielding fantastic mutant powers and discovering how to wield fantastic devices of the gods and the ancients that is technology, ultimately learn of their enclosed world. Originally published in 1976, it would go on to influence a whole genre of roleplaying games, starting with Gamma World, right down to Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic from Goodman Games. And it would be Goodman Games which brought the roleplaying game back with the stunning Metamorphosis Alpha Collector’s Edition in 2016, and support the forty-year old roleplaying game with a number of supplements, many which would be collected in the ‘Metamorphosis Alpha Treasure Chest’.

The Long Hard Mile: A Solo Adventure is something different for Metamorphosis Alpha. It is an update—is that a ‘backdate’?—of a scenario which originally appeared as Metamorphosis Alpha: The Long Hard Mile for use with Metamorphosis Alpha, Fourth Edition, for use with the classic version of Metamorphosis Alpha. It draws from a storyline where the Starship Warden runs into an invisible asteroid filled with mushroom and crystal life forms smashing a hole in the ship’s hull and letting in a rash strange new lifeforms which seem to want to take over the ship. Feeling that it was in need of transition piece which tied the collision to the events aboard the Starship Warden, the author wrote The Long Hard Mile which both explored the consequences and presented the first solo adventure for Metamorphosis Alpha.

Several weeks ago, the ship hit something hard and the world about the village seems to have shaken again and again, followed by strange changes. New plants roaming and killing, a nearby valley, once wooded, now filled with giant mushrooms taller than the trees they replaced, and deadly plants everywhere. The hero of the story is equipped with the best that the village has to offer and sets out to investigate. The first thing he sees upon reaching the head of the valley is three high tech weapons mounted on tripods, with signs of burn marks on the ground and trees ahead of them. Why are the weapons there and what were they being fired at, are just some of the initial questions to be answered in the opening entries in The Long Hard Mile. As the Player Character explores the valley, he will plunge into Fungi Forests, find himself stabbed and spiked by strange flora, make friends with a piece of mobile artillery, get battered and spoken to by fungi, and ultimately discover some of the valley’s hidden secrets.

The Long Hard Mile: A Solo Adventure is relatively short and runs to just twenty entries. It is fun, and mechanically, it does involve a high degree of combat, but there are two or three scenes involving some roleplaying too—especially if the scenario is run as a standard adventure with a Game Master and several players. The combat scenes will require reference to the Metamorphosis Alpha rules, but in other scenes where a player needs to roll dice, the mechanics are explained in the entry. The scenario includes two pre-generated Player Characters, Scar-Lock and Lock-Scar. The former is a Pure Strain Human, the latter a Mutant Humanoid. Their character-type will not have any effect upon their explorations of the valley, although Lock-Scar does have some advantage in have various mutations which will help him in a fight. If the Player Character manages to survive and escape the valley, he should be able to bring back several weapons along with a few secrets and the means to end the threat which has emerged since the crash and taken over the woods.

Once a player has run through The Long hard Mile in solo fashion, there is nothing to stop her from running the scenario as an adventure for a standard group. This is relatively easy given the limited number of entries in the adventure, but to make it little easier, the Game Master should draw up a map of the various encounters so that it will be easier to plot the Player Characters’ movement from one location to another. As a solo adventure, The Long hard Mile is playable in an hour, but as a standard adventure, a group should be able to complete it in a session or so. And like so many supplements and scenarios for Metamorphosis Alpha, The Long hard Mile works with almost any post-apocalyptic roleplaying game, from Gamma World to Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic.

The capacity for The Long Hard Mile: A Solo Adventure to be played as both a solo adventure and a standard adventure, even if a short one in both cases, gives it a versatility that few scenarios possess. It also means that the Game Master gets to play Metamorphosis Alpha for a change, and whether her character—Scar-Lock or Lock-Scar—manages to survive her explorations, he can become an NPC spurring the Player Characters into action and rooting out the mysteries of The Long Hard Mile: A Solo Adventure.

Views of the Warden

The Book of Handouts – 16 Scenes to Show Players is a supplement for Metamorphosis Alpha: Fantastic Role-Playing Game of Science Fiction Adventures on a Lost Starship. The first Science Fiction roleplaying game and the first post-apocalypse roleplaying game, Metamorphosis Alpha is set aboard the Starship Warden, a generation spaceship which has suffered an unknown catastrophic event which killed the crew and most of the million or so colonists and left the ship irradiated and many of the survivors and the flora and fauna aboard mutated. Some three centuries later, as Humans, Mutated Humans, Mutated Animals, and Mutated Plants, the Player Characters, knowing nothing of their captive universe, would leave their village to explore strange realm around them, wielding fantastic mutant powers and discovering how to wield fantastic devices of the gods and the ancients that is technology, ultimately learn of their enclosed world. Originally published in 1976, it would go on to influence a whole genre of roleplaying games, starting with Gamma World, right down to Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic from Goodman Games. And it would be Goodman Games which brought the roleplaying game back with the stunning Metamorphosis Alpha Collector’s Edition in 2016, and support the forty-year old roleplaying game with a number of supplements, many which would be collected in the ‘Metamorphosis Alpha Treasure Chest’.

Next to come out of the ‘Metamorphosis Alpha Treasure Chest’ is Book of Handouts – 16 Scenes to Show Players. There is no denying the power of a good handout, whether is the matchbook from the Stumbling Tiger Bar found in Jackson Elias’ hotel room at the start of Masks of Nyarlathotep or the Origami-style elemental stones from The Doomstones campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying or the rotating puzzle from The Chained Coffin for Dungeon Crawl Classics or the opening screen crawl scripts for West End Games’ Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game. They engage the players and draw them into the world of the roleplaying game, building atmosphere and a sense of immersion. Yet for most fantasy roleplaying games, handouts take the form of maps, but there is a special case for Dungeons & Dragons. Going all the way back to S1 Tomb of Horrors, certainly Advanced Dungeons & Dragons has had a history of including a separate booklet of images keyed to locations in a scenario, so that when the adventurers reach a particular location, the Dungeon Master can flip to the relevant image in the Illustration Booklet and show it to her players. These illustrations brought each location alive and made the Dungeon Master’s task all the easier, and it is from these Illustration Booklets, for S1 Tomb of Horrors or more recently, Dwimmermount, that the Book of Handouts – 16 Scenes to Show Players draws from for its inspiration.

The Book of Handouts – 16 Scenes to Show Players is simply a book of illustrations of scenes aboard the Starship Warden. Unlike the Illustration Booklets for S1 Tomb of Horrors or Dwimmermount, there is no text associated with the images in its pages. Or indeed, an actual scenario associated with it. What you have instead is literally a booklet of images. Appearing in landscape and portrait formats, one image per page, they include a Tiger Mutant Animal in armour and firing a rocket straight at the viewer—and thus the Player Characters; a woman dressed in the clothes of the Ancients, asleep in her cyropod; and a bunch of scruffy Pure Strain Humans, bearded and armed with flint spears, looking nervously into a strange hole in the wall. Some are humorous, like the four Wolfoids, clearly enjoying themselves travelling in some ancient vehicle, the passengers with their feet, whilst others are horrifying, such as the Pure Strain Human being strapped down by medbots whilst staring at the metal leg they are about to replace his own with! Then some are intriguing, like the entrance to a bunker or a facility marked as ‘Level 5’, the ground before it strewn with dirt out of which protrudes one of the many infamous coloured arm bands to be found aboard the Starship Warden and which will grant access to certain keyed areas.

However, because there is no text in the Book of Handouts – 16 Scenes to Show Players and so each picture is not displaying a specific scene or encounter, these images are not actually intended to be shown to the players—at least not at first. Their initial role is to severe as inspiration for the Game Master, for the Game Master to write scenarios and scenes in which the images can be shown to the players and illustrate what their characters can see. For example, perhaps one of the Player Characters’ friends has gone to serve the Ancients, but when they discover him, they see him about to undergo leg upgrade surgery at the hands of the medbots or during the rites to the holy carp in the lake upon whose shores the Player Characters’ village stands, the giant fish is suddenly attacked by something tentacular. Is this tentacled attacker a mutated beast, a robot gone rogue, or what else could it be?

The all but text free Book of Handouts – 16 Scenes to Show Players does another thing and that is showcase the artwork of the late Jim Holloway, drawings here each to a brief given by author, James Ward. And they are good pieces of art, interesting, a little quirky, and hopefully for the Game Master, inspirational, and her players, illustrative. And like so many supplements for Metamorphosis Alpha, the Book of Handouts – 16 Scenes to Show Players works with almost any post-apocalyptic roleplaying game, from Gamma World to Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic. Ultimately though, the Book of Handouts – 16 Scenes to Show Players is not a book that a Metamorphosis Alpha or other post-apocalypse Game Master absolutely needs, but short of ideas, it might provide much-needed inspiration for the next adventure.

Robot Rampage

Robots Among Us is a supplement for Metamorphosis Alpha: Fantastic Role-Playing Game of Science Fiction Adventures on a Lost Starship. The first Science Fiction roleplaying game and the first post-apocalypse roleplaying game, Metamorphosis Alpha is set aboard the Starship Warden, a generation spaceship which has suffered an unknown catastrophic event which killed the crew and most of the million or so colonists and left the ship irradiated and many of the survivors and the flora and fauna aboard mutated. Some three centuries later, as Humans, Mutated Humans, Mutated Animals, and Mutated Plants, the Player Characters, knowing nothing of their captive universe, would leave their village to explore strange realm around them, wielding fantastic mutant powers and discovering how to wield fantastic devices of the gods and the ancients that is technology, ultimately learn of their enclosed world. Originally published in 1976, it would go on to influence a whole genre of roleplaying games, starting with Gamma World, right down to Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic from Goodman Games. And it would be Goodman Games which brought the roleplaying game back with the stunning Metamorphosis Alpha Collector’s Edition in 2016, and support the forty-year old roleplaying game with a number of supplements, many which would be collected in the ‘Metamorphosis Alpha Treasure Chest’.

The Starship Warden was stocked not just with thousands of robots, ready to help humanity settle the new world that the colony ship was destined for, but also large factories intended to manufacture yet more useful robots and automated terraforming machines ready to begin transforming the new world into a new paradise for humanity. However, these many robots were just as affected by the radiation cloud that caused the change as were the ship’s crew and colonists, and plant and animal stock, their A.I. brains warped and twisted and their programming altered beyond what their original designers intended. Metamorphosis Alpha focuses on the biological inhabitants of the Starship Warden, the Humans, Mutated Humans, Mutated Animals, and Mutated Plants. Robots Among Us switches the focus to the mechanical inhabitants of the Starship Warden to present a set of seventeen encounters with robots aboard the colony ship.

Written by Jim Ward, the designer of Metamorphosis Alpha, with many of them entertainingly illustrated by Jim Holloway, the entries in Robots Among Us range in length from half a page to two pages long. Each includes a subtitle which suggests what the encounter is about, such as ‘ Arc Bots – More Than Just Security’ and ‘300 Years And Counting – Butler Robot Ready To Serve’, an explanation of what is going on, some colour text—in bold—ready for the Game Master to read out to her players, and the stats for the one or more robots involved in the encounter. The writeup for each robot includes its normal reactions, so that the Game Master can easily gauge its actions. The Game Master will need to refer to the Metamorphosis Alpha rules for descriptions of the various Miscellaneous, Defensive, Weapon, and other systems installed into each of the robots, and in some cases will need to prepare an encounter to fit into her campaign, but others can be dropped straight in with almost no or little preparation. Their theme is always though, that of ‘robots gone awry’.

Robots Among Us includes encounters with warbots, security bots, horticultural bots, cargo bots, servant droids, bomb disposal bots, cleaning bots, med bots, and more. In ‘Bunker Bots’ the Player Characters are attacked out of the blue by a damaged bot, and tracking it back to its source reveals more; in ‘War Unit’, the Player Characters are visiting a village when they see a battle involving military bots nearby—do they join in, wait to salvage the battle, locate the source of the robots, or all three?; whilst in another village, everyone comes under attack by a host of war machines, but is saved by an intelligent tank that sat dormant for centuries almost like a statue outside the village! Given the short length of the encounters in Robots Among Us, it should be no surprise that many of them are combat orientated. Some of the more interesting encounters involve more roleplaying—upon the part of both Game Master and her players—than combat and whose events will play out over the course of several sessions beyond the pages of Robots Among Us. For example, in ‘300 Years And Counting’, the Player Characters encounter a robot butler who is still awaiting the return of its former masters and will treat them differently depending upon whether they are Humans, Mutated Humans, Mutated Animals, or Mutated Plants, a theme which runs throughout Robots Among Us and Metamorphosis Alpha and its subsequent descendants. Similarly, in ‘Mother Knows Best’, the Game Master gets to ramp up the camp when the Player Characters encounters a ‘Orabelle 3,000 Matron Unit’, and it starts to clean up after them and actually clean them and admonish them when they take actions which it perceives is dangerous!

Physically, Robots Among Us is well presented , neat and tidy, and an engaging read. In places, it could have been better organised to make it clear quite what is happening in each encounter. If there is an issue with Robots Among Us, it is perhaps that too many of the encounters do involve combat rather than other forms of conflict or engagement. However, that does make them easier to use by the Game Master, but it does also mean that the Game Master will want to use the encounters to be found in Robots Among Us judiciously, to mix them up with encounters. Of course, Robots Among Us provides plenty of support for the Metamorphosis Alpha Game Master, but this is supplement for a post apocalypse roleplaying game, so there is also a lot here which could be brought into the post apocalypse roleplaying game of the Game Master’s choice, whether that is Gamma World or Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic or any of the others. The content in the individual entries would require some adjustment, but the parred-back stats in Metamorphosis Alpha would make that relatively easy.

Robots Among Us is a useful supplement, a supplement which the Game Master can pull off the shelf and peruse and prepare an encounter with relative ease—though some encounters require more preparation times than others. Robots Among Us provides solid support for Metamorphosis Alpha, and with a little bit of effort, for other post apocalypse roleplaying games too.

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.