I wish I could say I knew what was going on behind the scenes with Battletech's future timeline, but I still don't know. It's one of the reason why I haven't bothered to have another blog entry since March of last year. Catalyst, as is their want, is keeping the details close to the vest, refining the events up to the last minute that will send the universe into a new future.
Still, it's been too long I know, but I've been a bit lazy in keeping either one of my blogs up, which didn't help.
But it's as new year and new dreams and a new start. (Especially with those websites you've been logged into demanding the passwords you haven't used in a year....) So, here it is again, the Battletech State, repaired, revived and hopefully up and running again.
To find out what's going on with Catalyst, I will point you to the talk Randall and Brent gave at December's Mechcon. It's here: Mechcon 2018 Catalyst Gameslab -- What's New (Recap) (There is a loss of audio for several seconds right after the intro -- that's the site, not the video). It's the best I can do about new stuff.
Now, a couple of things I did work on: I helped with the new mapset that will be out in March. Grasslands is a mapset of six, double-sided maps, each side with a different map, giving you 12 maps to play on. It was hard work, as Brent said. And I also did some writing for Shattered Fortress, the start of the timeline moving forward.
But let's shift back to the subject of the Blog: The Legacy anthology.
Legacy is a unique anthology in that the star isn't any one person, but a Battlemech: The Grasshopper. The tracing of a single 'Mech through 300 years of warfare, from the fall of the Star league to the Jihad. When the call for stories went out, we had to pitch for time periods as well as stories.
I lucked out and got the final spot. My story is called "End of the Road," and it's about a member of Stone's Lament who was a student studying history when history pulls him into war. It's not only a story about the final major battle of Terra, but it's also a look at the question of "Is an object historical if it's been destroyed and rebuilt so many time?" The old Grandfather Ax paradox, only with Battlemechs.
In this story, I wanted to take a look at some of the things that happened during the Jihad. Due to things beyond Catalyst's control, the Jihad is a big hole, fiction-wise. Short stories are not a substitute for novels, and there could be a dozen novels on the Jihad and still not fully flesh it out. I went with Stone going up against St. Jamais in North America and fleshed out a small part of the Lament. Maybe one day, someone will go back and write novels about the Jihad and I hope that whoever it is takes the small pieces scattered across these short stories and pulls them into the story they write.
The reaction to the anthology has been positive -- as I write this, the rating on Amazon is 4.7 out of 5 Stars. Unlike the Battlecorps anthologies, these stories are all brand new, commissioned just for this anthology. I think we will see more of these sort of anthologies -- brand-new short stories with a theme. I think we'll see more of the Battlecorps anthologies, once everything in the fiction plan has been sorted out. In addition, there will be more novellas and novels somewhere in the plan, though as to what, I have no idea.
Well, that should be all for now, hopefully I can have something new to read on this blog on a regular basis this year.....
Later!
Craig
