Of course, that was in large part because they had tried to make them fully interoperable with the primitive character rules in BattleTech, so you had weird things like lower Gunnery ('Mech) and Piloting ('Mech) skill scores being better than higher ones (kind of like AD&D Armor Class). Still, however legitimate the reasons, the fact remains that MechWarrior First Edition was a hellaciously clumsy RPG. I mean, this was the game system that gave us the immortal rule citation in the personal equipment section of the Technical Readout: 3026 sourcebook: "Each grenade may be used only once."

My high school crew and I played the hell out of it anyway, because we played a ton of BattleTech and it was the only RPG system available for that universe (MechWarrior Second Edition wasn't out until my senior year). Flawed as it was, it gave us the opportunity to branch out and do things in that setting besides the actual 'Mech battles. This was an opportunity we took full advantage of.

By an odd coincidence, the premise of our MechWarrior campaign was very similar to the basic setup of the new BattleTech video game. Our small group of PCs (there were four or five players, depending on the week, and we each had two characters—one a veteran and the other a relative rookie at the start of the campaign—so that we could vary the sorts of missions we did) jointly operated a tiny mercenary oufit, not unlike the player character and company in BattleTech.

Though we rarely played more than a lance at a time, because of the arrangement described above, our outfit was a little larger—our full strength was most of a company (usually 10 'Mechs of the standard 12), and we had a commensurately bigger DropShip (a Union-class). We also had our own small JumpShip, a Merchant-class, and occasionally rented out its second hardpoint to make some extra cash, if somebody else happened to be going our way. Got to defray those operating expenses however you can, right?

(There was, I kid you not, a page of tables in the original MechWarrior rulebook where you could roll all this stuff up.)

The two PCs who were principal owners of the company were named Marks and Spencer, entirely by coincidence—Spencer's player and I didn't know each others' characters' names until we were done generating them and had started playing. We (the players) assumed that the department store chain by that name would be long gone and basically unknown in the 31st century, and so pretty much no one in-universe would get the joke (including, possibly, the characters who made it), but the unit was called Marks & Spencer Ltd. anyway.

So for the past couple of weeks, as I've been playing the new BattleTech, I've been kicking around the idea of bringing back M&S for a guest shot, not entirely unlike the way Don Griffin and company appeared in Eyrie Productions Destroys the Marvel Universe.

Here's the thing, though: it's been (fuuuuck) 30 years, and I'm (to borrow a phrase from The Mighty Jingles) old and crap. I can't remember most of the details, including but not limited to—embarrassingly enough—the player characters' full names, callsigns (I'm not sure we even really used callsigns in our game, come to think of it) and in many cases even what 'Mechs they had. Likewise, though I remember the general story arc of the campaign (inasmuch as we imagined RPG campaigns to have such things in those less developed times), only the broadest strokes have stayed with me.

So upon reflection, I thought what I might do is hybridize the two—sort of hang the details I remember from the Elder Days on the framework of the HBS BattleTech's premise and see what happens.

Or would that just be weird?

(Looking around, I realize that that is a vaguely hilarious thing to be wondering at this stage of the game, but still. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.