[#Tabletop Thursday, 22.05.25]: Unboxing Some Battletech: Mercenaries Kickstarter Gear!
Orrite fam, here we are.
Another week that’s flown by in both ten years and a microsecond, 2020’s style. And this particular juncture of the week is ripe for regular series, and utilising day-names for alliterated serial segments!
For real though, it’s been quite a minute since I’ve done any unboxing videos/playthroughs of the (too many, especially during lockdown) board games/tabletop swag I’ve been slowly acquiring.
Speaking of slowly acquiring - most of you out there have hopefully received your fulfilment of the Kickstarter campaign backed in 2023.
As mentioned in the video below, there’s a whole myriad of financial vulnerabilities attached to being a tabletop/board game publisher at the moment. With the cost of living flowing both horizontally and vertically up and down the supply chain, the hobby industry has been hit hard. Seems the arts took a pretty heavy post-COVID hit, and the logistics train is (in some/many cases, literally) slowed to a grinding halt.
For that reason, I’ve been patient with awaiting my pledge-tier from the Battletech: Mercenaries Kickstarter campaign.
And now, it’s here! And you get to see me in action, hamfistedly doing an unboxing style video. Enjoy!
Resources mentioned in the video are contained underneath the link.
I want to give a massive shoutout and thank-you to both Aetherworks and Catalyst Game Labs for getting these rad products here, and for persevering through what’s sounded like a litany of holdups on their end.
(Oh and for reference from the video - found it, it’s a Marauder, yay! Watch for context).
Peace, Love, (Grindcore) and Robots xoxo - Brady.
LINK TO VIDEO (via our Youtube Channel):
RESOURCES/COOL LINKS:
WTF is Battletech, Even?
Good question!
And with a 40+-year development of lore, worldbuilding, franchise changes, additional products, canonical changes etc - what essentially boils down to ‘Game of Thrones in Space But With Even More Backstabbing/Less Dragons’ has a lot going under the hood once you drill down to specifics (see an example from below via the incredible Sarna.net project).
Here to provide some answers in a much more succinct and less tangential form than I can manage, are several sites and videos I’d heartily recommend for mech-noobs:
a) Sven van der Plank - Known for doing Battletech lore videos to a depth and breadth that must’ve involved levels of hyperfixation even my spicy-brain can’t really reconcile, Sven has some fantastic, snappy introductory videos to various aspects of the lore - Great Houses, Clans, major epochs/eras, etc.
For a really concise, snappy take to get you up to speed in 1/3rd the length of my above unboxing-ramble:
b) Tex Talks Battletech (a running series within the Youtube content-creator posse known as BlackPantsLegion) is a fantastic way to get immersed in the series with a bunch of humour, grandiose & high-calibre production and some fantastic audiodrama/narration. I think I’ve learnt more about the overall lore of the Inner Sphere vicariously whilst chucking on a Tex video than I have most anything else.
Bonus - Tex and co not only invest a lot into their own channel, many of the feature videos (TTB being a huge one) double as fundraisers for charitable causes. I’d say ‘the meek shall inherit the Earth’, but there’s nothin’ meek about Tex’s wise-acre, twelve-pack-a-day-habit oratory style.
To learn how the whole convoluted shitshow that is the Inner Sphere current-day (‘current day’ being 1000+ years from now) came to be, i.e. through the Space-Telstra/AT&T/Your Phone Provider Here Jihad, a new Dark Age and a Soviet/Khanate-coded bunch of nutcases wrecking an uncivilised civilised society that just spent the last 1000 years under neofeudalism… takes breath digitally - here.
Here’s a great starter. Super cinematic and worth watching on a TV, even:
c) Lastly, I want to direct you to the fact that Catalyst Gaming Labs are working really, really hard on a genuine go of reviving the close-to-corpse the Battletech franchise had been for quite some time prior (long story on that one - TL:DR, publishing and licensing dramas/woes).
For instance:
You can straight up just grab the official Battletech Primer from the website right here for nothin’. Zero dollars, it’s yours baby!
Not enough? Already read the primer, watched the above video? ‘Kay, s’all good friend. How about this page right here stacked with hours of free reading, help with getting painting sorted/head around the game etc. (e.g. company/faction-specific colour scheme/painting guides, goddamn colouring books (now that’s a mindfulness colouring book I can vibe with), previews of the current Kickstarter campaign (as well as the wildly successful Clan Invasion Kickstarter), Technical Readouts, novels/novellas, Turning Points, Master Unit Lists and a looot more?! Go on, go git it.
FURTHER BATTLETECH LORE-DIVING REQUIRED? INTRODUCING THE BIG-LORE-DADDY:
Sarna.net
Easily the most comprehensive resource available for Battletech on the internet, Sarna is a massive volunteer project you could basically consider Battletech’s Wikipedia. A fan-run site that’s been in operation since 1994 (!), it’s an invaluable resource for campaigns, writing, lore-learnin’ and all manner of other mech-based goodness!
No, seriously, when I say Wikipedia, I mean it.
Like, for example, this here is just the page for Sarna, which in-universe is one tiny system in an innocuous corner of Capellan Confederation space. Oh, what’s that? A blog post/articles’ worth of lore, with links to major/minor factories, mercenary groups, small and large-scale historical events by year, an Inner Sphere localised map and an impressive array of stats just for one planet, Sarna III (astrophysical/ geophysical metrics, history, culture, government, infrastructure etc).
Every time I forget how much is crammed into Battletech lore after 4+ decades in operation, I’m reminded of just how whack the barebones ‘basic’ lore timeline is, for example.
Bonus: Brym’s OpFor
Rather than just link you the document directly, I felt it best to include the original Reddit thread which OP provided Brym’s OpFor. That way, you’ve got an opportunity to thank this community-creators’ great project yourself!
Said link in question can be found riiiiiiiight here.
Been hankering to play Battletech solo/co-operative as opposed to and/or in addition to normal skirmish/campaign play?
Like me and live out in the sticks with few folks interested in the idea of adults getting together to roll dice and laugh about bashing a mech’s head in with its’ own arm whilst being carpet-bombed by long-range missiles?
Check out Brymm’s OpFor, which will give you a whole set of cards/rules/triggers that flow really nicely for simulating a human opponent at the table re: decision-making, etc etc.
Ahead of the release of Mechwarrior: Aces (the formal system being published by CGL as we speak), I really recommend checking this out. It works better than you’d expect, and it’s also been fool-proofed by Yours Truly, who truly is the fool when it comes to mechanics/crunch/anything requiring the logical parts of the brain!
Thanks, Brym! Much mech-love from me. <3
FUTURE ISC STOMPY-ROBOT STUFF:
It’s my intention to continue on this little Battletech-charade in future by playing through Brym’s OpFor proper, and reporting the results right back here on the blog. Whether that’s written and later narrated ad-hoc, filmed etc etc, I’ll have to get back to the Jumpship and ponder on some more.
As mentioned in the video, doing a podcast episode or two (or three, or four…) on Battletech lore is something a monumental undertaking in practice. I’d be up for doing an episode on the BT universe, and/or zero in on very specific/niche areas and give my two cents.
Not news to those who’ve been following the blog a while, but I’d like to remind you guys that passionate fans, hobbyists and people just wanting to gasbag/school me (won’t be hard!) on your favourite aspects of the lore/franchise/games (video/tabletop) associated with Battletech/Mechwarrior - reach out to me, dudes/dudettes/dudefolk!
I am all about having people on the show and/or to correspond via Q and A’s. Whether you’re a tabletop RPG designer, game-master, local Battletech-enjoyer or just wanna chop it around this subject, please feel free to get in touch with us via our email, here on the site and/or our socials. We’d love to hear from you nerds, you’re in safe company amongst us geekazoids.
Peace, Love and Grindcore (With A Splash Of Irradiated Planets Due To Space-Telstra Cultist Weirdos Going Nuts Over Some Admin-Guy They Now Worship) xoxo - Brady.