A Note on a Recurring Question about TRO:3063...

      So, it's been twelve years since I published the TRO:3063.

In that time, a number of people have asked why we never featured any Clan machines in our TRO.

Some appeared genuinely upset about the perceived lack.

I answered at length, once, in all that time because the correspondent seemed to be genuinely perplexed.

For those that care, here is the modified text of my reply:

That last question was a doozy.  I’m reminded why I try to stay in contact with smart folks like you, people who have their heads screwed on tight.  It’s perspective, among other things.  

My traditional answer a decade back was simple, “there wasn’t room”.  This was intended for the folks then who talked nasty about the TRO - simply, it appeared, because we didn’t feature their favorite faction.  Specifically, the Clans.

But there’s a lot to unpack there.  

A snapshot: Chris Snider introduced me to BT on the USS Abraham Lincoln.  We played as a small group and one day, our ship was assigned to get the flight deck re-covered while anchored off Fremantle, Australia.  Christmas of 2002, I think, in preparation for the 2003 strike on Saddam.  Chris and I were invited to play with a local Aussie BT group and they were nice enough, but they pub-stomped their guests (we were given random IS machines) with Clan BattleMechs.  Not a hell of a lot of fun, that game, although Perth was great while we were there.

We played on the ship with IS machines, occasionally dipping into Clan tech (my fave was and is the StormCrow B).  But for me, the Clans and their zellibrigen and the rest of their cobbled-together culture were always, like the Klingons, a plot device, an ‘evergreen’ threat similar to the Joker in the Batman comics.  The Clans weren’t people so much as they were a bad thing that was going to happen to you.  Like a force of nature.  Like Khan in Star Trek II.  They were messed up.   And you dealt with them.  You knew they were never going completely away.  But you didn’t want to be them.  

So for me, the idea of writing about a plot device was foreign.

Fast forward to 2007.  I’d been doing some writing of BT fiction and winning a handful of online writing contests.  A fellow came along and asked me to write some entries for his fan TRO, the 3062.  So I did, quite a few of them, with no word count limits or anything.  It was a rough bit of work, as you might imagine.  But quite a lot of it was Clan stuff, and I found my footing weaker than usual as a writer.

     When you talk about the Clans and their motivations and their culture, they don’t bear very close inspection.  As a writer trying to parse the thoughts of a Clan warrior, I discovered very early that their culture and their personal behaviour don’t have much depth.  At all.  And most of what IS there consists of a towering spiritual pride, what you might describe as rampant egoism, an entire society led in large part by egoists exhibiting all the traits of the Dark Triad (Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy).  

     Yet, curiously, they never quite fall out among themselves to the point of extinction.  Given their levels of miracle technology, you’d think they would.  But, in most of the rest of Battletech fiction – which is where I sourced my research – the Clans were all about ‘honor’ and insults and revenge.  Screaming egos seized center stage, stinking and sweating and bleeding throughout most of the paperback fiction.  A living contradiction – imagine, if you can, a flock made entirely of sheep who are actually all wolves in disguise.

     Now, I believe this was deliberate.  The Clans were deliberately vague; they were a menace with a blank face upon which you could project anyone’s features.  And that served FanPro’s story.  But then players wanted that tech, that competitive edge the rule-breaking ClanTech gave them, so they could feed their own sputtering egos on the tabletop, feeding on other players.  So they started writing their own power-fantasy fiction and demanding the same from the publishers.  And the Clans had to be fleshed out, while their inherent contradictions were played down.

But the Clans STILL don’t hold up under inspection.  Even after 30+ years of being the focal point of game, the average Clan character doesn’t act at all like a normal human past a certain point.  His society is a perpetual hot mess because it was never more than a hash-up of Native American and South American pre-Columbian cultural motifs.  The only thing holding it together is a tremendous amount of what we writers call “handwavium”.  If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a material that allows you to assume mutually exclusive things of a fantastic nature, and place them side by side, and call it good.

“Well, it’s the far future, so we’ll assume the Clans magically know enough about the human body to make artificial wombs that work and genetically modify people while not messing them up.”  But for some reason, they can’t modify human behavior through altered genetics – except to make the resulting 'warriors' worse as people.  And they’re curiously ignorant of what most other men know about human interaction and the human spirit.  You’d think the writers would be wiser than this.  Maybe they are, and just ignore the stuff that doesn’t fit the action-adventure aspect of the book they’re writing.

Clan leaders apparently cannot figure out how to live with each other for five minutes without resorting to culture-sanctioned murder.  They have all the benefits of living normal lives, without ever actually living normal lives (with all the tedium and sacrifice that entails), and never suffer the consequences in terms of extinction.  We never see any Clanner live, love and suffer as a normal human being for any appreciable length of time.  There are other things, though.

     Why is there no mention of population decline when all the artificial wombs are tied up making super soldiers?  There’s a lot of gratuitous sex, sure.  And by gratuitous, I mean it’s merely hedonistic.  It’s not done with the intention of starting a family, there is no bonding for life; it’s inhuman.  And the family is the bedrock of every human culture we’ve ever known.  How do the Clans survive?

      (As an aside, you find that a lot of stories written in the Western genre of the 1930s-1950s portray American Indians the same way.  Louis Lamour was an exception, and I am sure there are others, but they’re by and large treated as plot devices.)

     So I avoid writing about them when I can.  To me, the Clans are something of a bore, a chore to write.  I don’t like writing them, or about them, because they’re not normal human beings with normal reactions.  If I tried to include the Clanner or his machines in my work, I would be hard-pressed to maintain the flavor because they are such janky exceptions to all the humans I have met and read about so far.  Except for the evil ones, of course.  

     People complain about how D&D races like orcs and goblins are somehow born evil.   They have a point.  Apparently, these are intelligent races - but with no free will.  It's a contradiction.   That detail might have been something Gygax and his crew left for the DMs to elaborate on.  We’ll never know.  But you never hear a peep from the critics about the Clans.

     I HAVE written about them in passing; if you look at the entry for the Nimravus under Notable People, you’ll find Fred Schuvaltz.  But I know what lies behind them.  Most folks just shrug, if they care even that much, when I tell them the brief version of ‘why no Clans’.  I mean, there is no shortage of fan-made Clan stuff out there.  I thought the Inner Sphere could stand a deep dive, one that featured about half vehicles, half ‘Mechs, and maybe dig into the IS factions a bit more, give them a richer past than the company would.  The company has to appeal to everyone and they have a narrative to follow.  I don’t, so I have the greater freedom.  

 

Thanks for stopping by.

Steve

 Beating back the Real World....

    Hi!  It's been a year and a half since my last post.  Thought I would drop in and let you know that new machines are slowly being polished and readied for the 3063 Update.  Dated somewhere between 3065-3066, it's a look in on some other machines available to the Inner Sphere and Periphery shortly after the FedCom Civil War.

I know, I know.  There is no battle armor.  There are no protomechs.  But most notably, there are no Clans.

None.

And from what I see of 3145 material, thank God.  Clanner dweebs have infected everything; it's like a reflection of the real world.  But of course, while Coleman and Bills fire their best writers and substitute hacks pushing "The Message", they can only poison the game going forward.  The past of Battletech can be added to, but not erased and certainly not re-written.  And add to it, I will.

Loculus Hover Transport (Marian Hegemony)

Janissary Missile Support Vehicle (Eastern Inner Sphere)

    I know, "Eastern Inner Sphere" is not very helpful.  "Everything to the right of the old Chaos Marches", how's that?  And let me tell you, for spamming the enemy with every kind of munition you can imagine at ridiculous ranges, the LRM-5 is God's gift to the infantryman.  You simply overwhelm any AMS the target may have with so many possibles, the number that make it through are hardly affected.  And you run them out of ammo fast.

Anyway, that's all I got for now.  Time constraints and money restrict what we can accomplish, but it's still moving forward.

Thanks for stopping by.

Steve

 

 Lurking in the weeds...

We are quietly working on an update to the '3063'.  It will be a report from the year 3065 and feature mostly new machines, with a few significant updates to older units that could have been done better in the original TRO.  We're going to put out about 15 entries, so it won't be in the works for five years (!).

The new units are going to focus, again, on the technology of the Inner Sphere vehicles and 'Mechs.  It has been 11 years since the original TRO was published, and I see no change in the need for new Inner Sphere machines.  By 'need', I mean machines that are interesting, likely, function well in a reasonable tabletop scenario, and look cool.

In Memoriam...

The folks on 4Chan had a nice TRO project going.  It was started in 2014 or so.  It went along well for about six or seven years, then sputtered and ran out of gas.  Real Life can be hard on dreams.  I expected great things of it.  I was very favorably impressed with the designs and the thinking behind them.  I was less enamored of the sometimes harsh criticism of my own work, but 4Chan's gonna 4Chan.  

Nevertheless, I tried in my limited way to help get things going again.  Things looked up and it seems as though the project might actually get rolling.  Munin even graciously permitted me to do a few edits.  But it all came to naught in the end.  It seems that some folks behind the project were more concerned that they alone be perceived as 'owning' the project then actually get the thing done.  

I was (falsely) accused of trying to 'take over' the damned thing and claim it for my own!  Like I'd have access to art and files that they'd paid for.  Like I'd want to sink more years of my dwindling lifespan trying to 'take over' someone else's work instead of, you know, doing my own - *again*.  After a discussion between myself and Munin, I was quietly dropped.  I believe they decided to carry on themselves.  But after that, nothing happened.  No more comments on 4Chan.  No more updates to their blog.

So be it.  

I have been a member of many fan clubs at one time or another in the past, and watched with fascination (always from the outside) as the internal politics played out.  It was always the same.  There were so many promising ideas and projects, and so many wonderful things that could have been done by such talented people.  But the ones in charge seemed concerned mostly about their share of the credit and this idea of 'ownership' of the resulting projects.  And one thing was crystal-clear: if they weren't getting what they wanted out of it, neither would anyone else.

I wish the fellows who were on this project nothing but the best.  A lot of bad things were said about my character and my motivations, but I forgive them.  Talk is cheap, especially there, and I am old enough to separate the wheat from the tares.  It's a shame, really.  I have a copy of their initial demo and that is all.  

Like the Star Trek fan clubs of the early 1990s, it could have been a great thing.  Maybe one day someone will pick the 4Chan TRO up again, and in the words of Captain Picard, "make it so".  

We need our dreams.

Thanks for stopping by.

Steve

 I have some News on the TRO: 3063 Miniature front....

Ten years have come and gone since we released the TRO: 3063.  I made a paper copy of it, considered making an Updates version, and life went on.

Some people used it in their own games, others simply read it.

Back in 2011, we collaborated with several artists to create 3D models for miniatures based on the illustrations found in the TRO.  There were about fifteen or so.  They seemed popular.  All of these miniatures had to be purchased from Shapeways, a 3D printer foundry, because ten years ago, only company-level organizations could afford to purchase and install 3D printers.

The Shapeways miniatures were (and are) expensive.  

Over the years, our principal miniature designer, Dorian Sherratt, died of a heart attack while playing lazertag somewhere in Scotland.  God rest his soul.  Meanwhile, 3D printers came down in size and price and went up in capability and speed.  So much so, that everyone with a few hundred laying around can make his or her own custom miniatures.  The CAD programs for designing miniatures (and other things) have also increased in power and gone down in price. 

So now, our former layout man, the irreducible William S. Burt, is in the business of making miniatures based on what's in the TRO: 3063!

He has an artist, a very good one, Kiwi Colour Studios, who will be gradually producing a model for each machine in the book.

I know some of you still play Battletech, some of you actually used the machines in our TRO, and some of you have always wanted miniatures to represent your stuff on the table.  Good.  But - a Shapeways miniature now costs almost $50 for the good high-rez version.  Some new options are on the way. 

You can get the STL files either by joining Kiwi Colour Studio's patreon

(https://www.patreon.com/posts/claymore-design-76066245?utm_medium=post_notification_email&utm_source=post_link&utm_campaign=patron_engagement)

or when they are released on Cult3D. There are several authorized merchants that will be able to print the mini for you if you don't have a printer...

Give it a try!

Thanks for stopping by.

Steve

 Another TRO Update...

As everyone is aware, the 'Rona hit us rather harder than we thought.  Well, harder than some people thought, and nowhere near as hard as some people predicted.  I am almost 61 and have been controlling diabetes for a couple of years.  No illness yet.  We're blessed.

But... the crisis has passed from being a medical problem to a political opportunity.  Some folks, having tasted the power granted them under temporary conditions, have done and are continuing to do their best to make sure that our present 'pandemic state of emergency' will never end.  We've had an election 'fortified', a euphemism chosen by the victors to describe what folks in the old days would have called 'ballot stuffing'.  All under the cover of a 'crisis' of the virus.  But I don't care about any of that.

There have been no local gatherings of BattleTech players for over a year.  A lot of the folks playing the game have other things on their mind - such as gainful employment and making their payments on time, or at all.  I don't blame them.  The annual wargaming convention has been cancelled once, and will likely be cancelled again.

The current (and forever ongoing) insanity has affected my schedule as well.  I originally intended to have TRO: 3063 Updates (circa 3069) ready to go in April 2021.  I figured a year was enough time to get the art, writing and so on together in a timely manner.  After all, been down this road before.

But it's been one damn thing after another, even while CGL relentlessly 'updates' their product and pushes it and the available technology into the future of BT - I think 3145 was the last date I heard of, but I cannot be sure.  It is hard to remember that the Jihad, Devlin Stone and the Republic of the Sphere, and the Dark Age are all in the rearview mirror, and getting smaller each day.  

These things were current and larger than life when I published the original TRO:3063.  However, from hanging around fan sites and reading posts, I gather that even today, many folks are playing in the eras of the past, and not the present.  Not sure why.  Clanners are the most vocal of the online faces I see, but I always thought of the Clans as the Klingons of the Inner Sphere.  They are meant to be level bosses, or the Ultimate Boss, of a video game.  You don't play the Klingons, unless you're OPFOR.  

But folks have made fetishes of the Clans, despite any number of unreal 'facts' about them that clash with human behavior or even the little we know of how the human body works.  It's why a goodly amount of BT fiction, fan or professional, comes across as Mary Sue.  It's wish-fulfillment.  

So I will STILL not deal with the Clans in 3063.  There is no shortage of fanboi Clanners - let THEM write their own TRO for that era.  It has been almost nine years since our work came out; anyone could have done something like it in that time.  One effort originally started in 4Chan looked good in 2014, posting some truly impressive progress over the years, but.... it's been seven years and the book's not finished.  It may never be finished.

People grow old, people change.  But I still have an abiding interest, if not love, for the game and a respect for the world-building that lies behind it.  I will move my Updates schedule to April of 2022, cross my fingers and clear the decks.

Wish me luck!

Thank you for stopping by.

Steve Satak

Welcome To the site!

Hi!  If you're new here, and looking to download the fan-made TRO: 3063 and associated books (Record Sheets, Alpha Strike cards, etc), please use the map on the right and go to September 2012.  The first entry will be your destination.  I have installed new links for your downloading ease.

----------------------------------------

This site has been through a few changes due to my various dreams.

I wanted to get a German language version out.  I spent money and time on that and though the second guy was willing to do it, Real Life intervened and I realized I just didn't have the chops to do it.  Throwing money at a late project doesn't save the timetable.  And there didn't seem to be a demand. 

I stop in about once a quarter to my cloud storage and check the traffic specific to the download of the TRO.  I don't do this to feed my ego.  I do it to gauge the need for maintaining this place and the links. 

So far it seems substantial, enough to justify keeping this blog open and the cloud storage paid up.  For the past eight years, you folks coming here have been able to download this TRO to your heart's content. 

That shouldn't change. 

Enjoy your stay here.

We're Making Some Headway...

Hey, everyone!

Alex is back from summer vacation and is working on the translation for the back cover, the inside headers, etc.

I daily await my InDesign Dummies book, as I am eager to brush up on my old skills.  It can't be very hard; it's just that I did a brain dump in 2013, never guessing I would need the skills five years later.

Can't find the original InDesign disk, either, so here's hoping I never get a corrupted program!

I am working hard at completing my paperwork for the shipyard, looking for temporary work while I wait, and so on.  The days are wide open, and I should have time for everything.  If the weather would just cool down a bit, I might get more done!

This is one of the things I do when I am not working on, or playing with, Battletech:

Life counters and Trackers for Magic, The Gathering.

Thanks for stopping by!

Steve