In 1987 the very first BattleTech rulebook, the BattleTech Manual, published. It was just a compilation, really, of the BattleTech, CityTech and AeroTech box set rulebooks. And in fact, when I was picking it up for the first time, I made a comment to my friends that “meh, probably won’t use it that much, but have to get it.” And then we wore out two or even three copies…they never let me forget that.

Three years later, in 1990, the BattleTech Compendium published. I was living out of the country at the time and so my best friend, Tony, slipped a copy of it to me in the mail. I can remember pulling it out of the box and just gazing at the stunning new style of BattleMech in the Timber Wolf, along with the battle armor in the Elemental. And then the new toys to play with!

In 1994 the BattleTech: Compendium: The Rules of Warfare published. A posse of my friends attended Gen Con for the very first time that year and we picked it up. I remember declaring loudly that it was fate that I’d managed to make Gen Con that first time because FASA was selling the first ever limited edition book–a nice, blue-leather binding of that rulebook–for BattleTech. And if I’d not attended, who knows if I’d been able to ever track it down….

In 1998 FASA published the BattleTech Master Rules. I’d been employed at the company for two years at that point and was able to work carefully alongside Bryan Nystul, the BattleTech Line Developer at the time, to craft what we hoped would be the ultimate edition of BattleTech! There’s a lot to be proud of there…but looking back, so many ways it could’ve been better, IMO.

In 2002, now working under the FanPro banner and hitting the 20th anniversary of BattleTech, it seemed appropriate to publish the BattleTech Master Rules, Revised Edition. Not a lot of changes were made, really. Instead it was about incorporating various weaponry and units that premiered across the previous half decade of Field Manuals.

Enter Total Warfare, published in 2006 (the cover is the Catalyst reprint…it was originally published under FanPro and then reprinted under catalyst in 2007–on its fourth reprint now). This was taking ten years of development experience and twenty years of player experience and folding that into a very different presentation and style of book. While the core of the BattleTech rules remained the same, I made more radical changes than all the previous books combined.

One of the driving forces behind Total Warfare (and all of the core line of rulebooks) is that the ancillary box sets and rulebooks had never sold well. AeroTech, BattleSpace, BattleTroops, BattleForce…every attempt simply fell far from the mark of success. And there were numerous attempts…four books and box sets for the aerospace side alone!

So if I couldn’t justify new box sets or rulebooks for those ancillary units, then I’d fold them all into every aspect of the rules. And in the process try and answer every last question that had ever arisen on a gaming table. And flesh out even more rules to explore more aspects of the universe. And make sure there was extensive, comprehensive examples to cover all of the above….

I think you can see where this was all going. The Total Warfare rulebook line is seven books, over half a foot tall, 2,528 pages…1.6 million words…give or take a few tens of thousand.

And I’m incredibly proud of it. It has a clarity of rules and explanations and a depth of options to cover well…almost anything you can think of or have ever run across in the fiction. From roleplaying a single person to running an entire faction through a Succession War…it’s all there!

But all of that has created serious Achilles Heels. The two biggest are actually intrinsically linked:

1. With so many different types of units in every book, trying to find specific rules for just BattleMechs is actually problematic. And not just the idea that depending upon the game you’re playing for those BattleMechs you might need four rulebooks at the table. But the specific rules even within Total Warfare can be lost under a deluge of ProtoMechs, combat vehicles, support vehicles, conventional infantry, battle armor, and various aerospace units.

2. The BattleMech is lost in all of that. It’s the star of the universe and yet within the rules it just…gets…lost.

What does all of that mean? It means, as I shared on the latest podcast with the great team at No Guts No Galaxy, it’s time for a new rulebook, the BattleMech Manual.

After thirty years of playing the game and twenty years developing it in a host of ways, time to take all the experience of those years–along with the strengths of the Total Warfare line–and build a single rulebook of 200 or less pages that focuses solely on the BattleMech. And that includes mining materials cross multiple rulebooks to pull them into this single volume. My watch-word on this has been trying to create a book that “95 percent of the players will use 95 percent of the time.”

The book is in the final stages of review and editing and has started layout, so in the coming weeks I’ll be dropping out development blogs discussing the book. Specifically how we’re taking the concepts above and folding it into the actual book we’ll publish.

Enjoy!

Randall