Update #105 wrote:UK and Asia prepare to fulfill!

Hey backers,

Short update for you this week, but here's where we are:

US/CAN/RoW without hubs: Only about 1100 orders left in Wave 1 and 2. We expect to be finished with these regions in December. QML will then continue on with Wave 3.


UK: Started sending address verifications at the end of last week. We expect shipping to begin next week!


EU: Ship is still in transit - we expect word of arrival in the next week or two.


Asia: Packing orders has begun!


AUS: still in transit. Ship is expected in mid-December.

We're finally closing in on international fulfillment. The 'Mechs are coming - keep an eye on your email for those address verifications.

 Graphite wrote:
If I paid 12 million bucks to any other half dozen people in a garage I'd be expecting them to hire a half dozen more people to get things sorted out


Automatically Appended Next Post:
This "oh we're just a smol little company, sorry we're a bit disorganised" does not fly when you're dealing with a 12 million dollar contract, which is only part of the work your company is doing.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
And even more when you have an update that might add well include the phrase."Australia. Sucks to be you. Anyway, news for countries we care about"

VAT has been secured for the UK and EU

Then, final shipments for any stock shortages will be sent to each hub. Shipments will take 2-4 weeks depending on location and size of shipment

AUS: still in transit. Ship is expected in mid-December.

The Australian distributor asked us to let you know that fulfillment will not be able to start in AUS until January due to their approaching holiday closures. As soon as the new year kicks off, they are excited to hammer these shipments out to backers as soon as possible.

 Overread wrote:
You also lose a huge chunk to Tax as you will pretty much qualify for the highest band you can with that amount.

 Graphite wrote:
Well fair enough, but how many of the half dozen people were Catalyst finding enough work for before they had a $12m contract?

Because if the answer is "six" then you're still in a position where you had enough folk for normal operations and need to consider having a few folk to dedicate to a project that we can only assume will be profitable.

Update 105 is fascinating. I do not know anything about international shipping logistics, but how common is it for a cargo ship to have an arrival date range of "the next week or two"?

Lorcan Nagle wrote:Episode 32



12th November 2024
Guest: Christopher Frye, Business Development Manager at Liya International

News

-Pax Unplugged - first weekend in December, CGL will be streaming
--2025 product announcements
--Schedule will be posted soon
-Grinder kits have arrived at the CGL warehouse. 800 copies are being sent to distributors, 200 set aside for demo team.
-New releases
--BattleTech
---Kurita T-shirt (reissue of the faction logo from Clan Invasion kickstarter)
---Founding of the Clans digital box set
---Support deck revised
---Technical blueprints
---Commander’s case
---Force Manual: Kurita
--November
---Shadowrun
----Tarnished Star
---BattleTech
----Hot Spots: Hinterlands
----Essentials, full retail release
-Shadowrun fiction Humble Bundle live at the moment


-Chris was hired by Liya to get new clients, sales and so on. His role has expanded to include project management and communications. He speaks with prospective clients, mans the booth at shows, they prefer passive sales to active cold-calling and the like.
The Owner of Liya owned a factory in China, moved to the US and opened an office there while still running the factory remotely. Chris was hired to be the sociable face of the company.
-He was in the military and got a sales job in Pepsi where he learned a lot of people skills. He was in the Flames of War scene, friends of his were helping him with his CV and sent it to Battlefront as they planned to open a US office and they interviewed them to run it, he worked for Privateer Press after that, then E-figures distribution and then Liya which he loves.
-Chris was talking about how he knows about CGL’s projects a year in advance and he says there’ll be some very fun announcements coming up.
-The 4” Mad Cat was a gift from Liya, they did the tooling and everything as an apology for scheduling issues with the first Kickstarter, and presented one to Loren at a dinner meeting. Loren decided at that point to include it in the Mercs Kickstarter.
-Liya USA is very much there to aid English-speaking clients to work with Chinese manufacturers. All Chris’ project managers speak English and Mandarin. They have partners to do a lot of other work like shirts, hats and such that aren’t in-house at Liya’s factory but they have the contacts and will manage the relationship.
-CGL was already a Liya customer before Chris joined.
-Loren decided to work on product design through COVID when a lot of other companies were entirely shut down. Even though production and shipping wasn’t necessarily happening they were still working on design and the like.
-Loren will ring Chris up with an idea, which becomes a spec sheet that comes to their dedicated product manager that details what they want - say a forcepack with 4 minis, a tray, box, cards etc. That gets costed, STLs get sent over, prototypes are made, tooling includes working out how to make the separate pieces assemble as seamless as possible.
-Mini assembly, QC and boxing is detailed in their videos on YouTube.
-When asked about relative costings of minis, Chris talked about how a lot of companies have larger capital overhead like renting an office, getting people to come in and work and all that adds costs that need to be accounted for in the sales price. Using a third party factory means that the overhead and capital costs of the factory are spread among multiple clients, and being a private company means no need to provide dividends to shareholders, like a certain other games company based in the UK
-Talking about production partners for the Shadowrun scroll, they talked about the production process. Liya’s contracted with separate factories to get the fabric print, the endcaps for the scroll, the wooden boxes and so on. These all came to Liya’s factory for final assembly and QC. Liya handle the billing to the partners, component overstock to account for QC issues and all that, so Randall or Talon or Loren only has to talk to a single contact to manage all that.
-Rem asked about what happens if CGL approach with a product idea that ends up with too high a cost? Loren is very adept at negotiating, either altering the product, or working out a better price by ordering more units or combining an order, or shelving it until they can better afford it.
-CGL projects Chris has been most excited for: He can’t talk about it until after PAX. From what people know about, the Mercs Kickstarter, he talked about the vehicles and BattleArmour, and that they learned a lot about the BattleArmour especially.
-Non-CGL project Chris loved the most? A Wonder Woman model for Cryptozoic, models for Wētā, Jasko’s Street Fighter line. Seeing thousands of all the same painted components that become dozens of finished models.
-Chris is always appreciative of Loren being mindful of Liya’s production capacity, they’ll hold off on projects to make sure they don’t overwhelm Liya


Q&A
-What’s the most emotionally impacting project? They do all the trains for Ticket to Ride, Asmodee did a huge order for components during COVID at a point when very little work coming in and it really helped keep the company going. From a relationship-building moment, the 4” Mad Cat really helped Liya and CGL.
-Would Liya make models of their injection-molding machines like Bandai do of the gundam ones? If you pay them enough. They’d be more likely to do STLs. Based on employee feedback they’ve added more machines with robot arms to avoid strain on employees removing parts from the machines.
-Will all the Gencon interviews be on YouTube before PAX? No, capacity issues mean editing has been slow. Tyler also had to upload some raw footage which has been done
-Any update on shipping salvage boxes for people who got vehicles? It’s still on Tyler’s to-do list, they’ll probably ship direct from PSI.
Is there any chance of unassembled mechs? In hard plastic? Hard plastic is a different product line, and CGL would have to feel they have a customer base for them. It’s a Loren and Randall decision, but it’s outside the current product line. The big question is whether the product would be good enough to restock over and over.
-Who chooses the music for the YouTube clips? Chris does, it’s the same song and it’s free in his editing app.
-Any news on the 2nd Star League Forcepack and McCarron’s Armoured Cav? They hit PSI yesterday. They’re expecting a December 11th release date right now..
-Is it possible to do injected plastic in different colours? That’s how the Grinder kits are done. They default to grey because it shows detail well. When asked if they could do two colours on a single model? Not with their current machines, they’d have to do two separate parts and attach them seamlessly.
-What about mech-scale DropShips? It’s a great idea, maybe someone will announce that in the future.

-Chris asked Rem how she got into CGL? One of the writers joined her Shadowrun group, she later wanted to to a live play of their story. She was introduced to Jason Hardy and from there to Loren who asked her to do up a promo video for her project. She did a kickstarter for it and at the end realised she could manage kickstarters for other people. One of their first contracts was managing Edgezone for CGL. She was pestering Loren to manage the Mercs campaign and he didn’t respond, then two weeks before the launch he was like “hey, want to manage the campaign?” From there she suggested she just do marketing because CGL was paying consulting rates at that point.

-Chris talked about how impressive Ross Thompson is at marketing and what a force of nature he is. Rem said she wants to be him when she grows up.

Using a third party factory means that the overhead and capital costs of the factory are spread among multiple clients, and being a private company means no need to provide dividends to shareholders, like a certain other games company based in the UK

 Graphite wrote:
But according to the UK distributor's blog, as of yesterday it isn't mentioned as either

For any updates on BattleTech fulfillment, please contact QML and monitor the Kickstarter.

Hey there Backers!

We have a big update for retailers today, and want to share our plan for public retail releases.

Here’s the usual news first:

US/CAN/RoW: Only about 500 orders remain for Wave 1 and Wave 2 fulfillment, including Company Store backers.
UK: Scheduled to begin fulfilling this week or next! The hub expects to take about 5 weeks to fulfill. Unless you have a specific issue with your order, please avoid reaching out to QML or the fulfillment hub for status details until after the first of the year.
EU: The shipment is arriving at the hub before the end of November. Once the shipment arrives and is checked in, we should hear from them about fulfillment timelines.
Asia: Packing shipments is in progress!
Australia: Per previous updates, the shipment will not arrive until mid-December at the earliest. Currently, we are still expecting fulfillment to begin in January.

Remember that these numbers include Wave 1 and 2 for each region. Wave 3 will not qualify for any exclusivity windows, but will continue to be fulfilled by all hubs once Waves 1 and 2 are completed.

Retail Planning
Note: We’ll be referring to retail backers as Company Store backers, and general retail as “retail”

Context:

First, here’s some context on the spirit of the policies we put into place for the Kickstarter:

Originally, fulfillment for Company Store backers was planned to take place last, after all individual backers had received their items. Our goal was that no backer should visit their local game store and see someone able to buy a product that they, as a backer, hadn’t received yet. What we didn’t anticipate was the delays causing fulfillment to complete in different parts of the world at such different times. We still want to honor our commitments to our individual backers around the world, while acknowledging that we need to pivot to support our retail backers as well.

Additionally, during the early days of the Kickstarter, we partnered with ACD Distribution, Alliance Games Distributors and Peach State Distribution. As distributors, they had the ability to market the Kickstarter to stores and offer free shipping if a store pre-ordered through them. In turn, the distributors backed the Kickstarter for those pre-orders. While these stores do not have their own Company Store pledges, they are considered Company Store backers when it comes to fulfillment and exclusivity.

Of the approximately 350 Company Store backers, 296 of them are based in North America and are able to be fulfilled. With US/CAN fulfillment nearing completion, we want to support our Company Store backers as much as possible, while still keeping to the intent of fulfilling individual backers first, as best we can. As it stands, there is a limited window of opportunity to get the majority of Company Store backers their orders before the holidays, and we don’t want them to miss that chance.

Otherwise, releases of Kickstarter products into standard, non-KS retail availability will occur regularly throughout 2025, rather than all at once. Once a particular region's exclusivity period ends, all previously released Kickstarter products will be made immediately available in that region. For details on the current release schedule, please see the “General Retail Release” section, below.

We’ve decided on the following plan, which we believe will be the most beneficial to the maximum number of backers, both at the individual and Company Store level.

Company Store Backer Fulfillment Plan

US/CAN/RoW: 296 Company Store Backers

Effective last week, QML and Alliance have begun fulfilling Company Store backer orders. Stores can begin selling their pledge merchandise upon receiving their shipment. Fulfillment is expected to finish in December, which means the 30-day exclusivity period would begin then, ending in January. Once fulfillment is complete, we will confirm those dates and provide them to distributors and retailers. We will not solidify those dates until we get word that fulfillment is complete.

Our warehouse’s general retail street date for January is Jan. 22. This will allow all retail backers at least 30 days of exclusivity. (If a further unexpected delay occurs, we will of course, push the street date again).

EU/UK: 45 European Company Store Backers

We expect EU and UK fulfillment to complete within a few weeks of each other, with Company Store backers being the last fulfilled. Exclusivity will begin at completion of each area’s fulfillment of Company Store orders. General retail will begin when BOTH EU and UK exclusivity expires, likely in February. We will set a street date for EU and UK once our partners report fulfillment is complete. The UK will likely have a longer than 30-day exclusivity period.

Because the EU is waiting a few more weeks than the UK for their fulfillment to begin, effective last week we released BattleTech: Encounters exclusively in the EU (aside from the Barnes & Noble release from March 2024). Encounters will not be released anywhere else until February at the earliest.

AUS: 12 Company Store Backers

As mentioned in previous updates, fulfillment is currently scheduled to begin in January. Assuming their fulfillment completes by the end of January, with Company Store backers fulfilled last, their 30-day exclusivity period would end at the beginning of March. We’ll announce dates as we get information on fulfillment.

Because Australia backers and retailers will be fulfilled last, we wanted to give them a little extra: At the end of the AUS exclusivity period, we’ll be releasing Salvage Box: Mercenaries Legendary II & III early to Australia for retail. We won’t be releasing that Salvage Box to the rest of the world until June.

General Retail Release Plan
We will release Mercenaries Kickstarter products for retail regularly throughout 2025. Though subject to change, our current release schedule for Mercenaries Kickstarter products is detailed below. This includes new products that were available in the Pledge Manager, even if they were not funded by the Kickstarter. In addition to the products listed below, other BattleTech products outside of the scope of the Kickstarter will continue to be released as normal. As a reminder, products are released throughout the month, not necessarily on the first day of each month.

As mentioned above, once a particular region's 30-day exclusivity period ends, all previously released Kickstarter products will be made available in that region. For example, if Australia’s exclusivity period ends in March as currently expected, all prior Kickstarter releases from January and February will be available at retail at the same time.

January:

Mercenaries box set (Standard Edition)
Inner Sphere Recon Lance ForcePack
Battlefield Support: Recon & Hunter Lances ForcePack
Battlefield Support: Assault & Cavalry Lances ForcePack
Clan Cavalry Star ForcePack
Salvage Box: Mercenaries
Salvage Box: Battlefield Support
MapPack: Savannah
BattleMat: City: HPG Heliport
February: (UK/EU will also release everything from January above during February)

Inner Sphere Security Lance ForcePack
Battlefield Support: Battle & Fire Lances ForcePack
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: Translated by Jaime Wolf
Encounters: BattleTech
BattleMat: Savannah: Large Lakes
March: (Australia will also release everything from January and February above during March. Additionally, Australia will have Salvage Box: Mercenaries Legends II & III available in March)

Inner Sphere Battle Armor Platoon ForcePack
Salvage Box: Visigoth
Somerset Strikers ForcePack
BattleTech: Legends II
MapPack: City
BattleMat: City: HPG Engineering
April:

Inner Sphere Heavy Recon Lance ForcePack
Battlefield Support: Objectives ForcePack
Legendary MechWarriors II ForcePack
Salvage Box: Blood Asp
BattleTech Cookbook
BattleMat: Savannah: River Delta
May:

Clan Direct Fire Star ForcePack
Battlefield Support: Rifle & Command Lances ForcePack
Salvage Box: Savannah Master
BattleMat: City: Central Park
June:

Inner Sphere Assault Lance ForcePack
Battlefield Support: Heavy Battle & Sweep Lances ForcePack
BattleMat: Savannah: Sinkholes
Salvage Box: Mercenaries Legendary II & III
July:

Legendary MechWarriors III ForcePack
Inner Sphere Pursuit Lance ForcePack
August:

BattleMat: FieldTech: Grasslands/Desert

UK: Scheduled to begin fulfilling this week or next! The hub expects to take about 5 weeks to fulfill. Unless you have a specific issue with your order, please avoid reaching out to QML or the fulfillment hub for status details until after the first of the year.

 Graphite wrote:
Yep, this sounds very reassuring. And definitely reads as "GamesQuest don't know what's happening because we haven't told them. Last week we said that they'd begin shipping this week. Actually it might be this week. And then it's going to take over a month. So that would be by 31st December. We will get this delivered this year! Honest!"

UK: Scheduled to begin fulfilling this week or next! The hub expects to take about 5 weeks to fulfill. Unless you have a specific issue with your order, please avoid reaching out to QML or the fulfillment hub for status details until after the first of the year.

Lorcan Nagle wrote:Episode 33



19th November 2024
Guest: Joshua Franklin, BattleTech developer, Hot Spots: Hinterlands developer

News:
-CGL “may be doing something special” for Black Friday, it will be announced via the mailing list and then via social media
-PAX Unplugged is coming up soon, a list of “fun stuff” to be shared is being compiled. A list of panels and games will be announced soon

-Hot Spots: Hinterlands street date is the 27th of November. It releases on the CGL store on Black Friday
-The first big thing Joshua wrote for BattleTech was the Alpha Strike rulebook. He’s been working on the MUL and other volunteer projects before this.
-He hadn’t done any writing before this, he joked that his English instructors would be surprised that he was writing professionally in any capacity.
-He had decided to do his own compilation rulebook for Quickstrike, the Alpha Strike predecessor and when CGL decided to do a standalone rulebook for the game someone pointed out that he’d already basically done one.
-He’s been into BattleTech since the late 80s, he tended to swing between D&D and BattleTech and he’s been on the BattleTech end for a long time.
-Working on the MUL let him propose ideas that ended up in the Combat Manuals. He was credited as an assistant developer but he says that was an overstatement.
-He then wrote Turning Points Vega (War of 3039)
-Ray then asked him to work on the new Tukayyid book that became part of the Kickstarter. That was his first full developer credit.
From there he worked on the Force Manuals and Hot Spots: Hinterlands
-He’s more of a rules writer but for Hinterlands he gave the hot spot writers guidelines on what elements to use and then approached other writers to do the fiction and fluff.
-His early games were very much in the scavenger 3rd succession war vein, the players would have to capture units if they wanted to upgrade for example. That’s always been a favoured way to play and he often tries to capture that in his books
-A favourite session of his was an Alpha Strike event he ran for the Mercs Kickstarter launch party. It was a similar vibe to the Grinder but scaled for Alpha Strike. So he had 8 players running 2 mechs each, 4 objective tokens in the board and each player had a different thing to do with the tokens - one had to hold them, one destroy, one steal, one drop off supplies, etc. He loves when games provoke conversation between the players
-Rem mentioned a similar moment at Gamehole con where she joined a grinder an hour from the end, there had been no kills so she joined in an Atlas and put a bounty on herself to create that cinematic moment of the Atlas cresting a hilltop and all the other mechs turn as one.
-The core idea for the book came from Ray, to try and recreate the Chaos March vibe, that player-sized units could get involved and feel like they can make a difference. The cover image is a merc called the Sand Wyrm, a character you can recruit. The whole idea with the Hatamoto-chi in a ghille suit is that they’ve been stuck on a planet for over a decade and they offer to work for you if you can get them off-world.
-The heart of the book is the thirteen hot spots, each is a different world in the Hinterlands with a conflict going on. Each side in most of these worlds is hiring mercs, and the idea is that the games will be two player merc units fighting, one for each side.
-Some Hot Spots are player vs enemy, and in that case the player controlling the enemy side gets paid anyway, the idea is they have a quiet contract.
-There are even a couple of Hell’s Horses-centred Hot Spots, allowing a player to play as the Horses too.
-The first step in product development was working out the Hot Spot system. Everything down to determining maps, force composition and the like. Joshua then got some writers to trawl through Tamar Rising to find some conflicts where the end result wasn’t confirmed, and then figure out why there were fights on those worlds, who was hiring mercs and why.
-There’s a whole chapter on Almotacen, a planet the 21st Centauri Lancers liberated and realised they had to stay around to prevent the pirates from moving back in. They start a hiring hall and this is the home base for all the mercs in the campaign. The book details a lot of notable personalities on-world, and the book presses on the moral issues the Lancers face. There are no RPG-specific rules in the book but the idea is to have idea hooks for RPGs as well as narrative BattleTech play
-Bryan Young wrote the opening fiction, Stephen Toropov worked out the Almotacen stuff.
-Hot Spots: Hinterlands had a lot more prep work compared to Tukayyid, they had a better idea of what the format of the book would be ahead of time, as a result they feel that the playability is better. Joshua feels that the results one can get out of Tukayyid are wilder than in Hinterlands.
-The relative lack of detail on the Hinterlands compared to Tukayyid meant they had a lot more creative freedom on what they could do.
-They had to rework some proposed scenarios to be more player-centric, removing special characters or units that would be quite powerful and would overpower the player’s units if they were on the table.
-The book contains six maps of the Hinterlands showing the changes in territory in 3-month jumps.
-Why should people buy Hot Spots: Hinterlands? Because you have all these pretty miniatures and you should have interesting games to play with them
-The cover artist is Tan Ho Sim, he also did a lot of the interior art.
-Stephen Toropov will be on next week to talk more about Hinterlands

Q&A
-How long did it take to develop the book from start to end? About a year to work out the system, which was also used for the Mercs box. Another year for the writing, editing, fact checking, art etc. And then the six-month wait for it to arrive with players.
-Any update on tales of the Bounty Hunter? Still ongoing, hopefully out before the end of the year.
-Any update on McCarron’s Armoured Cav and Second Star League forcepacks? Randall basically got hit with what he described as every illness he dodged travelling hit him at once. He’s been sick for 2 weeks and even had to visit an ER. Rem and Randall sat down for a product planning session. At present the release schedule is
--November:
---Hot Spots hinterlands
---Essentials
--December
---McCarron’s Armoured Cavalry Assault Lance (B&N Exclusive)
--January
---Second Star League Assault Lance
---ilKhan’s Eyes Only
---Map Scale Union DropShip
---Map Scale Overlord DropShip
---Map-scale Overlord-C
---And Kickstarter items as per the most recent update
-Any timeframe for ilClan updates for the Force Manuals? They’re caught up in a production bottleneck and will hopefully be quick once the bottleneck clears
-Any update on the graphic novel? Writing is ongoing, Eldon Cowgur is working on character art.
-Any update on Audiobooks?
--Double Blind just came out, they expect to release six more next year.
-Any update on the audiobooks for Kickstarter backers? That’s still ongoing.
-There were queries around Big Kappa items
--Fiction releases? At present it’s just ebooks but Rem and John feel they should get physical copies and are working on it.
--Merc T-shirts? The production schedule on these has slowed as CGL has a lot of capital tied up in Mercs Kickstarter and they need to wait until sales come in.
--Will they still get the last Star league Forcepacks? Unsure at this point
--McCarron’s Armoured Cav forcepack will be given to big Kappas.
--Will the Star league mug be on the list? It should be. Also Rem needs to ensure it and some other mug designs get added to the webstore.

beast_gts wrote:

 Graphite wrote:
Yep, this sounds very reassuring. And definitely reads as "GamesQuest don't know what's happening because we haven't told them. Last week we said that they'd begin shipping this week. Actually it might be this week. And then it's going to take over a month. So that would be by 31st December. We will get this delivered this year! Honest!"

UK: Scheduled to begin fulfilling this week or next! The hub expects to take about 5 weeks to fulfill. Unless you have a specific issue with your order, please avoid reaching out to QML or the fulfillment hub for status details until after the first of the year.

Yeah - there's still no mention of it on GamesQuest's blog page so I guess they're waiting on something from CGL/QML.

BrookM wrote:Is the Charger also part of this campaign?

Kothra wrote:Charger is in the IS Heavy Recon Lance.

 BrookM wrote:
I want the OG squared circle version, so IS Heavy Recon Lance it is whenever it shows up around here, many thanks! 🤘🏻

 Ghaz wrote:

BrookM wrote:Is the Charger also part of this campaign?

Kothra wrote:Charger is in the IS Heavy Recon Lance.

The CGR-1A1 Charger is in the IS Heavy Recon Lance whereas the CGR-3K Charger is in the Legendary MechWarriors II ForcePack.

 Ghaz wrote:

 BrookM wrote:
I want the OG squared circle version, so IS Heavy Recon Lance it is whenever it shows up around here, many thanks! 🤘🏻

Not exactly what you mean by the 'squared circle version' but the artwork for the 1A5 with its AC/20 would look the closest to that IMHO. The 1A1 would be the image below with its popgun array of five small lasers.

Lorcan Nagle wrote:Episode 34



26th November 2024
Guest: Stephen Toropov, BattleTech developer, Hot Spots: Hinterlands developer

News:
-Tomorrow’s newsletter will have details of a Black Friday sale.
--Items at 50% off include
---BattleTech Essentials
---Clan Invasion box set
-Deadline for webstore orders to hopefully arrive by Christmas is December 15th
-Rem reiterated Randall’s illness travails upon his return from the world tour, which delayed sorting out the release schedule.
--Revised release schedule:
---27th November:
----Hot Spots Hinterlands
----BattleTech Essentials
---December
----McCarron’s Armoured Cavalry
---January 15th
----Second Star League Assault Lance
----ilKhan’s Eyes Only
----Map Scale Union
----Map Scale Overlord
----Map scale Overlord C
---January 22nd (Pending Kickstarter fulfillment)
----Mercenaries box set
----Inner Sphere recon lance
----Recon and hunter lances
----Assault and cavalry lances
----Clan Cavalry star
----Salvage box: mercenaries
----Salvage box: battlefield support
----Map Pack: Savannahs
----Battlemat: City HPG/Heliport
-Pax Unplugged stream starts on Friday December 6th
--Friday
---BattleTech Announcements
---BattleTech Fiction
---BattleTech Aces
---Aces co-op playthrough
---Aces solo playthrough
(Saturday and Sunday are non-BattleTech)

-Hot Spots: Hinterlands is the first hardcover sourcebook including Stephen’s work, he’s stoked that it’s a black friday release
Stephen’s part of Hinterlands is more worldbuilding and sourcebook writing. Joshua initially asked him about setting up a hiring hall in the Hinterlands. He likened it to the cool “Adventure Towns” from D&D sourcebooks. Ray had suggested Almotacen as a planet to use and Stephen then populated it with ideas and plot hooks.
-He got into BattleTech in the early 2000s via MechWarrior 4 Mercenaries and MechWarrior Dark Age.
-An art piece was brought up, it’s the opening piece from the chapter for Almotacen, a scene from a story Bryan Young wrote for the book where the 21st Centauri Lancers’ special operations unit clear out a group of pirates but realise they’ll move back in once they move on. There’s a writeup for the unit in Shrapnel 15.
-Joshua asked for Stephen to come up with the Lancers’ “equivalent of the Black Widows”. Their commander, Rosín Douglas was a unique pilot in MechWarrior: Dark Age. He liked working on the environmental storytelling, like what does Almotacen tell us about the BattleTech universe, and what does the BattleTech universe say about it.
-The Fox Patrol may be spending some time on Almotacen soon.
-Stephen’s got into BattleTech by writing for Shrapnel. He asked Phil if he could submit articles and he was added to the list. He’s been over half of the issues but big projects took over his life. His wife proposed to him via Shrapnel! He then worked on pilot cards for a while, and that built up onto working on a number of other projects that haven’t been announced yet.
-Stephen has also worked on ilKhan’s eyes only. The fourth of the new era sourcebooks, it’ll complete moving the setting to 3152 following Tamar Rising, Empire Alone and Dominions Divided. They spent a lot of time working on it to get it right, to talk about what the ilClan and the new Star League mean and how the Capellans take it. The Capellans and Wolves have been riding high for a while and have never fought, so it’s interesting to Stephen to figure out how this works out. They’ve worked really hard on the book, Josh Perian was the lead developer.
Stephen was tapped to work on IKEO late last year, and it turned out that the initial writer’s meeting was in the middle of the timeslot at a con he was going to be running the World-Wide event at - which was the Wolves vs Capellans! He said to his players that he was going to have to dip out for an hour or two in the middle of the game, and please don’t ask him why.

Q&A:
-What part of Hinterlands is Stephen most excited to get out there? The easy answer is Almotacen, but also the potential for the book to facilitate pick-up games in the setting.
-What timeframe is Hinterlands set in? It’s set during Tamar Rising, up to having maps showing the changes to the territory across the events of the books.
-Any update on the BattleTech audiobooks? No change from last week. Rem doesn’t have any insight, they’re done by another company that John is liaising with. Rem mentioned her company does the Shadowrun books and they’re hoping to have a book up in the next few days pending approval from Amazon, with another about to be turned in.
-Are there plans for the BattleTech RPGs? Nothing Rem is aware of, she’ll be surprised if anything comes up at PAX, say. Some work is being done but nothing on the schedule yet.
-Will players have to return to Almotacen or can they get contracts elsewhere? Stephen isn’t 100% sure, there’s a system for rolling up contracts and even if the book says “return to Almotacen”, you could just handwave it.
-Any word on the ilClan era supplements for the Force Manuals? Only that Josh Franklin is working very hard on them
-Are the supplements a full product or errata? Not exactly sure, it’s going to be more than a couple of pages but less than a full book.
-Any word on Den of Wolves? Nothing to report
-What is Stephen’s favourite Mech? His initial one was the Ghost, he’s partial to the Coyotl because it’s what Roisin Douglas pilots, he’s partial to the Albatross, and some new designs that are on the way.
-Why aren’t minis bases textured so basing material sticks to it better? Rem passed the question to Randall. He said “just not something we thought about at the time”
-Any word on the next printing of Alpha Strike Commander’s Edition? A new print was done for the Kickstarter and it was sent to QML, the remaining stock will be sent to PSI once fulfilment is complete