You may be under the impression that I often forget about this blog for long swathes of time, like a soft-brained toddler or a hard-brained concussion victim*. That isn't true! I am keenly aware of this blog at all times. It haunts me like a Victorian ghost in a wealthy-but-decrepit estate out in the Berwickmanshire countryside. It dangles over me like the Sword of Damocles or its less well known cousin, the Dirk of Samocles. It gnaws at my soul like a "we need to talk" text popping up right in the middle of your workday, like a grumbling in the lower intestines forty-seven minutes after a risky bowl of street chowder, like the terrible tension of a locked door if you can't be certain that the keys to that door are inside it.
My long periods of neglect are usually because I have little worth saying, feel like I have little worth saying, or have had my fingers broken by Jimmy "The Nickname" Loanshark.
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| "It's-a me, Overused Stereotype-a, badda-bing!" |
But here we are in the shining sun. I'm loitering nearby with a roguish grin, gently rolling a Thing To Talk About in my palm. You coquettishly pretend you don't notice, but we both know that your Brief Unscheduled Time To Faff About On The Internet is showing, you minx, you absolute tease.
To get to it, I'm starting up a new RPG campaign and it is right at the crossroads of my ADHD hyperfixation and generally untrodden ground. It's not a type of game I've run before--systemically, aesthetically, maybe even thematically--so it's exactly the kind of thing that might be helpful for me to blog about.
Awhile back I talked about BattleTech, a wargame that is venerable in all connotations of the word; laden with baggage from its nascent years, dragged in fits towards the modern age, curiously inelegant in a way that is almost a different kind of elegance. I've decided (having dived deeper down the BattleTech rabbit hole) to run an RPG campaign in that setting.
No One Wants To Hear About Your Campaign
It's a truism I'll generally cleave to. For the most part that's because the activity a campaign represents, more specifically the social space it carves, can often be deeply personal. The mere facts of someone else's campaign are girded by a thousand different nuances of emotion, circumstances, contexts; we are privy to precious few of them. A buddy of mine had a retrospective on The One Ring as an RPG, and their campaign using it; they struck a similar note when they wrote "the experiences we love are not always portable."
So what is portable? Usually the mechanics of it. Look at the popularity of a thousand-thousand OSR blogs about how to run a hexcrawl, GM's advice colums, Twitter threads on how to treat your players, etc. These operative things are often quite easy to port and if, in the offering, you get to gush a little about your recent character or campaign? All the better.
The other thing is why. That's portable. It's nothing to you when I explain the weirdly specific way I eat a pickle**, but if I explain why I suckled that cucumber the way I did***-- that might have meaning to you (even if all it means is "I should avoid bringing pickles up around this wild-eyed homunculus").
Why?
So let's start in on the why of this campaign.
Why BattleTech? I wasn't super critical of the setting in my last blog but neither was I particularly kind. The truth is that I think there's a kind of special sauce in the absurd detail and scope of the setting; far from being a straightjacket, the availability and granularity of these facts allow me to approach my themes with a very material underpinning. And that's important for what I have in mind.
I want to explore, in this campaign, the question of whether and to what degree you can resist structures of hegemony using the tools of those structures. None of the political entities of the setting lack for oppression-- can you resist that oppression with Mechs? Who owns the factories and industrial centers which keep these things running? Who manufactures the munitions? How much does the necessity of the material fact of your BattleMech push you towards a complicity with one oppressive entity or another?
How?
Materiality matters to me, but in many ways only a specific materiality. Consequently, I'm not going to use the older editions of the MechWarrior RPG (1st, 2nd, or 'A Time of War') except possibly as a reference. Instead I'm going to lean on MechWarrior: Destiny for a majority of the task resolution of the system; I've been interested in the Cue System for a little bit, and it's come well recommended, so I'm keen to try out this permutation of it. Keep your eyes peeled for a deeper dive on the topic.
Where I am going to indulge some materiality is a) in the Mech combat system and b) in the 'campaign management' front.
For the former, I'm adopting Death From Above Wargaming's "BattleTech: Destiny" system (available on their Patreon). It negotiates between two poles of complexity, anchored on one end by Classic: BattleTech (mech combat via tax form) and Alpha Strike (mech combat via abstraction). Having played it a couple of times, I'm happy with how it plays-- quick enough to be done in a reasonable evening, detailed enough to have players worrying about whether they're gonna lose a leg actuator or cook off some ammo in a missile rack.
The real crunch is gonna be the campaign management; largely I'll be drawing from Catalyst Game Labs' "Campaign Operations". The more I interact with the BattleTech ecosystem, the clearer it is that there is almost certainly a chart for whatever minutiae has come to mind. In particular, this sourcebook allows me to:
- Track the personnel within a mercenary company; MechWarriors, mechanics, assistant mechanics, medical and logistical employees, administrative staff, etc.
- Track the logistical expenditures associated with a mercenary company; spare parts, ammunition, maintenance tools and repair times, transportation
- Have a system for creating and negotiating contracts; salvage rights, battle damage compensation, command rights, overhead reimbursement, reputation bonuses (or maluses)
That's right. I don't want them to do Mech combat which sometimes resembles filling out a tax form...
...I want my players to actually do taxes for a fictional mercenary company. I promise you I'm fun at parties.
We'll call this post a part one of two, but hopefully it gives you a peek at how I plan to approach my campaign notes here on the blog.
*I have no idea whether concussions make your brain harder or softer. Neither of them sound good. I engaged in some poetical license, but please don't report me or they'll take the license away.
**You bite the end off the pickle, then use your teeth to pulp the meat without breaking the skin. You keep your mouth vacuum sealed around the end and periodically shlorp.
***This produces a delicious slurry which can be shlorped up easily. It preserves the brine, keeps the whole process tidy, and is a seriously worrying thing to do on a first date. Don't ask me how I know that last bit.
