Battletech 3rd Edition

I recently scored a near mint copy of BTech 3rd edition from a game shop just like the one I purchased many moons ago from a model train hobby shop in North Carolina when I was 14.

Looking at the box then, nestled neatly between some obscure wargames in a corner, I thought "holy cow look at that mech, it's stepping out of fire being all bad as shit. It's friggin awesome". Followed shortly by, "Wait, this is battle tech... like the computer games (Crescent Hawks Inception/Revenge)? I wonder if it's like Advanced Squad Leader... but with mechs. I would so dominate ('pwn' not being part of my lexicon then) the Germans if I had a warhammer like that".

Now mind you, I had at one time created a pen and paper version of 'battletech' based entirely on what I understood from the video games. And my experience with wargames was principally of ASL against my father... and of losing.

After a few moments of befuddlement, excitement, and sheer curiosity, I tallied the cash in my wallet and asked my father to spot the difference from my allowance. Not long later I had the box in my possession and once home, I opened the seal to the box and peered within.

Inside was plastic miniatures of what previously was something held only in my imagination. After breaking him from the sprue I exclaimed over a paper chit medieval war game with my father, "Warhammer! Awesome!" I posed him a bit as much as 2 socketed arms can and made some wooshing sounds. He still doesn't look anything like the art work on the box... not that I cared.

And not just that, a simple rule system also laid within, nestled with imaginative art work, that created a running dialogue of broken machines and desperate gambits. I was captivated completely and wholly with just the miniatures alone. But an engaging game system that had no imaginable limit of capturing star systems and carving empires with carefully used elite pilots sold it far beyond that to me.
And it didn't have morale checks like ASL (stupid conscripts...)... or a rule book that makes dictionaries look tame.

Many games were played with my father, family, and friends. Campaigns were won and lost on a stray critical at a pivotal moment. I learned of the clans later on and became a bit munchkin-y, though I stuck with the Warhawk-Prime for the most part. Cheese was cried on the level 3 vehicle rules.

We stopped playing for a while and my father passed on. I miss him very much.

Upon reopening the 3rd edition Battletech box I just scored this weekend, and seeing all the miniatures I fell in love with so many years ago- just like how I had them originally, fresh in their gray plastic- I felt like I was 14 again with so much potential and wonder from such a small box.
I can't bare to paint them.

Jerrail

I posted this on 4chan about the Jerrail.
At the time I couldn't remember their name... still, I would like to introduce them in a campaign sometime beyond the evidence of their tampering.

For Traveller, I came up with a race of omni-vorous cannibals based on arrow crabs.

They had a penchant for cannibalizing other ships for parts and generally retrofitting them into their own crafts- wether it helped the ship or not. The end result was often a ship or colony that resembled a hash of mismatched parts that functioned fairly reliably in the long run despite being somewhat ungainly massive and crude.

This trait was developed partly because solar conditions on their home world caused the surface to be inhospitable to the point of forcing the survivors into underground shelters for an almost indeterminately long length of time. Everything became valuable to their culture, from other peoples possessions to oil stains.
It eventually led to them being uplifted into stellar society, or face what was commonly thought as being eventual extinction.

Shortly after being introduced to space, their perceptively greedy hoarding attitudes tended to get them shunned in the rest of civilized universe which led them to live in most of the backwater sections of the universe - collecting from passerbys what they "need" to survive.

A quickly adapted vessel or colony might just have junk strapped around it.

More long term, or heritage craft constructed and retrofitted at some of the few mother craft, are almost completely modular and are little more than rigging and a primitive workshop when it is launched.

The passage ways are unique in that they are triangular with ceiling flat and hand holds along the bottom. (Which would make a certain sort of sense to something shaped like a arrow crab.)

It got some kudos there. In retrospect it's not a horrible synopsis... and most of the notes for the old campaign that the Jerrail were set in are long gone.

Nostalgia: X-COM

Sometimes there are great things. Then there are awesome things. Worse still are the things that can only be revisited in memory. Though its better to recall these things rather than never knowing them, these artifacts of personality are something that I tend to dwell on during idle moments. I would imagine anyone does.

X-COM is the subject of some of those such memories. It occupied a great deal of my youth for a time before my attention wandered elsewhere.

This game holds a place with my memory as accompanying me during the first time I stayed up late... real late... around 1am in the morning or so. I was babysitting my siblings then while my parents were out. I was barely 13. I was home. Alone. Late in the bleak midnight hours fighting aliens in the dark.

I was scared for many reasons out side the game. The ephemeral quality of being awake during what would seem a forbidden time of night alone would be enchanting with a terrible quality. But being alone to face the terrors lurking in the shadows made it that much worse.
So I ordered my brave little soldiers, many of which I was attached to somewhat -going so far as to name one of my more potent soldiers "Ripley"- to explore the depthless unknown. It was almost certainly ordering them to their death. It often was. And in turn it further changed the darkness around me into a perceptively real threat.
The unknown presented a real danger to Ripley and them, and thus for me, for death laid just outside of their line of sight.

I didn't want them to die. But they did. The weak willed, those bastards, even ran from their duties. But the bravery of the few of my little heroes that stood against the turning of the inevitable night always stuck with me. In this dark hour, Ripley and her squad did not waver.

And so I didn't.

Alive!

Here it is alive and well on it's own. I long ago thought this blog was deleted... I had no purpose for it as, if I recall correctly, I was on MySpace at the time- which would make this the Miley Cyrus to my MySpace Hannah Montana... a sort of undead unliving thing that exists only when the other is seperated from it.

Though this isn't the first time I've found a tendril of my web presence lingering in the 'intertubes. It still remains somewhat frightening that it's here and that potentially something else forgotten that might be as well.

Not that I'm on some sort of personal inquisition against my own web presence. It's just always suprising to see yourself on the web years later. It conjurs a vague "Momento" style nostalgia that I'm not always comfortable with. Particularly with things left incomplete. Like this page.