At MechCon 2016 I showed off layout samples of the coming BattleMech Manual, and mentioned I’d be sharing them online….

Here are several pages from the Combat chapter of the BattleMech Manual (as you can see from the “p. XXs” still in the body of the text, this is a pre-final).

The first page above gives you a good look at the colors and graphic style of this new layout, along with the look for the diagrams.

This next page brings a few other items into the mix. First, it showcases how only the tab for the current section is highlighted along the edge of the page, with the rest subdued (please note the chapters for inclusion are not finalized, so the tabs will be changing).

Additionally, you’ll note that the example is completely off in its own box. This means it’s not inserted into the middle of any text–as all previous rulebooks have done–so that a player can ignore it if it’s not needed. Yet it’s there if it is (though there’s fewer over-all examples in this book than TW).

This next page showcases one of the things I’m most excited about. As I previously mentioned we took the text of the book and ran it through the filter of our demo agents. An exercise in tapping their expertise to better present the information in easier to understand ways.

GATOR is a direct result, as well as the “Strategic sidebar”; i.e. not sidebars of examples or rules, but of better ways to learn and play the game.

Then Ray did a fantastic job of wedding that concept to the visuals you can see below that sidebar in the headers of the text, calling out the modifiers that apply to each letter of that GATOR acronym.

So that while, yes, the text of the BattleMech Manual can be thought of as a “filter” with “only BattleMechs” applied to the Total Warfare text, we’ve spent a huge amount of work to re-work and re-present it all in thoughtful, new ways to aid in learning and use.

Finally, for this post, the last page I’m showing. Another angle where we’re listening to players and our demo agents, is trying to expand diagrams where appropriate. Every single previous BattleTech rulebook included a small “Firing Arcs Diagram” and then tried to explain how it worked in the text. And despite good text, it’s simply a complicated situation that often resulted in confusion among even long-time players. As such, the above, much expanded diagram, to really drive home exactly how such rules work.

Enjoy!

Randall