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
