I felt previous iterations I’d done of this scheme were a bit bland and the blueness of the gray-blue didn’t show up well in many lighting contortions, so painted in some Donegl Guards emblems and used an all over dry brush pass for the first time. Had variable results from mini to mini, but definitely helped overall and I’m pretty happy with how the Highlander turned out. Also modified the Archer from a 5R to a 5W.

I got a hold of an Atlas yesterday, it was my first assault mech since I just have the starter box, I painted it took it to go a game and a rakshasa took out the cockpit turn 2. What a great first showing. Its supposed to be painted in the Eridani Light horse colors I just dont have transfers yet.

Back around 1991–92, when I was a teenager, my gaming group discovered BattleTech. There were six of us, armed with a few FASA rulebooks, a BattleTech pawn box, and entirely too much free time. We played a campaign for roughly 18 months, often twice a week. To this day, it remains one of my fondest tabletop gaming memories.

Fast-forward about 35 years. My current gaming group has been together for around eight years. There are five of us, most of us take turns GMing, and we've played a lot of D&D, Pathfinder, and Savage Worlds. Good times, but I was getting tired of fantasy settings. I wanted something different.

Our group has a simple philosophy: We play whatever the GM is excited to run. An enthusiastic GM generally means a better game. So I announced that I wanted to run BattleTech.

None of the other four had ever played it. One had at least heard of it. Another didn't even know what BattleTech was. But they trusted me, so off we went.

I decided to use the same rules I remembered from my teenage years: classic BattleTech and MechWarrior 2nd Edition. Why not? Well, things got complicated pretty quickly.

Our campaign is essentially three games rolled into one:

• Classic BattleTech tactical combat.
• MechWarrior 2e for the actual roleplaying.
• A mercenary company simulator covering contracts, finances, salvage, repairs, and all the other headaches of running a small military outfit.

Unfortunately, Roll20 didn't support what I wanted to do, and the alternatives I investigated weren't much better for combining all three. So I ended up writing my own custom BattleTech/MechWarrior character sheet for Roll20. It's still evolving.

I also borrowed some ideas from the HBS BattleTech video game and expanded them into my own mercenary management systems. I particularly liked how HBS handled salvage, so I developed a system where contracts establish a C-bill payment, a number of choice salvage picks, and a percentage of what's left. It's been working pretty well so far, and the players seem to enjoy it.

Needless to say, what started as a nostalgic return to an old favorite has turned into a rather substantial GM project.

Our campaign follows Iron Tale, a small mercenary company operating in the Inner Sphere, beginning in January 3048, just before the Clan Invasion.

Because none of my players know much of anything about the Inner Sphere, I thought this would be a fantastic starting point. They have absolutely no idea what's coming. Getting to experience something as significant as the Clan Invasion through the eyes of characters who are just as clueless as their players should be a hell of a lot of fun.

I thought it might be interesting to document the experience here. Not just campaign recaps, but the challenges of returning to a 35-year-old game, introducing four experienced roleplayers to an unfamiliar universe, figuring out what works, and occasionally making things up because I can't find a rule that does what I need.

I'll share our adventures, the systems I've cobbled together, what works, what doesn't, and whatever lessons I pick up along the way. I'm certainly not claiming to have all the answers. I'm just an old GM dusting off some old games and having a hell of a time doing it.

We've been playing for several sessions over the past few months, and I've developed an overarching storyline that's already taken on a life of its own. Along the way, the players have unknowingly helped me create a major villain, made more than a few rivals, and generally given me plenty of material to work with.

Currently, Iron Tale is working alongside Wolf's Dragoons, investigating a conspiracy that threatens the HPG network.

And that's where things stand. More to come!

I've finally tackled one of the most iconic mechs that I've loved since my days with MechAssault, and holy crap did it have a lot of edges to highlight. In place of a standard torso with smaller cockpit, the volume of work was effectively shifted to the head and missile pods, but that left it with an absolute ton of crevices to handle. I kept finding little spots post-wash where I'd missed the basecoat and needed to do some touch up. All in all though, I'm very happy with the final product, both for the miniature and the base.

At some point I'll paint up another in the MechAssault colors, but that day is a ways off right now. Next project is looking like it'll be the (IS) Gladiator.

If you'd like to make your own base tags, see my post here: Name and Tonnage Base Stickers - Files, Instructions and Notes : r/battletech

Found this in my screenshots as I was replaying Battletech by HBS, figured this sub would like it. The memory leaks caused by a long session made my mechbay lag, and caused a Stalker and a Centurion to clip together when selecting them. The result?

A Stalker with Centurion arms.

I painted the Shiro, wife painted the Catapult. I will eventually repaint the Shiro.

I'm coming back to Classic BattleTech after years of Warhammer 40k, where both armies always have equal points. Now I'm running a two-player campaign with a friend, and I'm not sure how to handle balance.

Setup:

• 3028, Succession Wars era
• I play a small mercenary unit (a Kell Hounds offshoot), he plays the Federated Suns
• We each have about three lances, but his force has a lot more BV than mine. That makes sense in the setting: a Great House line unit is simply richer than a merc outfit.
• We track units, pilots, damage and C-Bills across games, so the rosters are more or less fixed

What I've found so far:

• Total Warfare has a scenario table where the attacker and defender bring different amounts of force depending on the mission, e.g. Hold the Line or Breakthrough
• Campaign Operations has a section on mission balancing and force creation, with a starting budget plus era and faction multipliers
• Alpha Strike mentions a 5% PV tolerance for pickup games (we play classic))

So my understanding is that a campaign isn't balanced at the force level. It's balanced per game, through the scenario: objectives, BV caps, reserves, and the fact that the weaker side doesn't have to win by wiping the enemy out.

My questions:

1. How do you handle this in practice? Do you set a BV cap per scenario and let both sides pick from their roster, or do you deliberately let one side bring far more because the objective makes up for it?

2. Are there other official rules or guidelines I've missed, e.g. in the Chaos Campaign, Hinterlands or the Mercenaries book?

3. How do you deal with pilot skill? Elite pilots make the BV gap even bigger, but it feels wrong to have the command lance crewed by 4/5 rookies.

4. If you've run a campaign with a "poor" faction against a "rich" one: did it stay fun for both players over many games?

I'd love to hear about your experiences, house rules and things that went wrong.

I am not the original artist.I made this to see what the Mech looks like without the cross section.

Strangers in a strange land

A bizarre spacial anomaly transported the Lyran Overlord dropship, LCS Iron Lion, carrying the 10th Arcturan Assault Battalion and 112th Donagal air wing, from the universe they knew to one entirely unfamiliar.

They landed on a world called Damaetus III/II ruled over by the Imperial Knight House Vyronii. After a brief moment of hostilities, the Lyrans were brought into House Vyronii as new members and their mechs as well as other assets incorporated into the house assets. After 5 years and some sanctioned integration of technology by Vyronii Sacristans (who in turn take great effort to make sure the Adeptus Mechanicus do not pry too much), the former Lyran mechwarriors have fully acclimated as Knights of House Vyronii.

This was a very fun commission to paint, by far one of the most complex paintings I've done. The owner of the Viking submitted the story behind this painting to the excellent folks over at Battletopia so go give them a listen.

King Viking was just the name that occurred to me while working on this piece. It wasn't requested by the commissioner nor mentioned in the battletopia

My take on a Hermit Crab, scaled more towards the IWM ral partha size of miniatures.

Next to the CGL scale king crab and Stinger, the hermit feels small.

Might need to make it bit bigger, but I like what I could model.

I had a lot of trouble finding this figure. There are old Ral Partha version on eBay for about $40, but that wasn't going to do it for me. I found a few sellers on eBay who were printing other unseen mechs and asked them if they could do the goliath (aka crab gunner), and eventually one responded to me (user ID: therealbitzbarn) and graciously printed off two of them and put them up. I bought both!

This first one is the classic Crab gunner from Dougram, and I'll do a second one up as a Tequila Gunner that has some platforms on the sides and sandbags for foot troops.

One thing to note is that when this one fell about 6" (15cm) on my desk the original barrel snapped off and was lost in the aether. I replaced it will a plastic-coated paper clip with all of the plastic removed except for the end of the barrel. The antenna are tooth brush bristles. Having a pin vice with many sized bits is essential!

This one isn’t my first mini, but it is the first mini that I felt like I didn’t completely ruin (I’ve never painted tabletop minis before).

I've recently managed to get my hands on some Gothic books, and I've been reading through them.

It does make me wonder how the Clans would react if they existed in the Gothic universe exactly as we know them, with no changes to their culture or beliefs, and launched their invasion as usual.

Well, I've heard that the Clans probably aren't going to appear in Gothic given the nature of the setting, so I guess there's not much point in speculating.

Still, I can't help imagining what would happen if the Clan warriors invaded the Inner Sphere and discovered that it was exactly the way they'd imagined it from watching the Clan Spaniel cartoons: a place crawling with genetically tainted people and monsters.

At least the Clan warriors would've been happy.

My girlfriend and I had another paint date today. She decided that a raven is "too emo" and made hers a macaw instead. I painted my Madcat as a tortie. My sister's cat really doesn't like company, especially when its my battletech buddy. So I've turned a madcat into a mad cat (pictured slide 3). Both mechs are still WIP, but not by much.

I finished the details on the 3 Gothic mechs I've got so far for my Kurita lance. So these three are done! Now I'm waiting for a Gothic Scorpion to show up on eBay for a reasonable price to finish the final mech.

I added a few small extras to all three to make them unique. The PHawk got the plasticard Bat Wings on its Jump Jets. No rules changed, just aesthetic fun! The King Crab got the tusks under the cockpit window and the ridge of shark fin plates running down the center of the back. And the Awesome, a converted standard Awesome, got lots of bits!!

The demon skull head and winged back banner are the most obvious! But it's also got a honking big vibro-axe in its left hand!! And a bunch of curved hooks on its shoulders and knees. Do NOT get charged by this one!!

Awaiting on my work table are more hooks and a curved mechanical tail made from GW Necron Mechadendrites and blades! I plan to remove the Scorpion's PPC from the torso, once I get one, and mount it on the end of an actual scorpions tail rising over the back of the mechs torso! The SRM launcher will stay where it is. 😁 Plus some hooked blades on the skinny legs made from GW Dark Eldar rifle bayonets, will finish the customization on the lance!

Hopefully I'll have an update soon on the fully complete lance!!

As title says, just in case someone wanted to check this new sculpts. LEFT is Clan Battle Star and RIGHT is Clan Invasion Box.

One of my favourite BattleTech events are the Wars of Reaving and the associated Society Revolt.

Here are the 3 OmniMechs most associated with the Society, embedded in a Clan Coyote Lambda Galaxy Unit. From smallest to largest - Cephalus (D config), Septicemia (Pariah) Prime, and Osteon (Prime). Linked with a Nova CEWS system, these ‘mechs allowed the relatively green Society pilots to go toe to toe with Clan warriors caste members. The Society organized its units into prime numbered groups of 1, 3, and 7 (called a Sept). These three are the first of a full Sept which will include some additional Septicemia and some other ‘mechs.

Ultimately that revolt was unsuccessful and the Society was destroyed. The Cephalus and Osteon were banned from use, while the Septicemia was allowed in limited use but forever renamed the Pariah.

Thanks for looking!