Lorcan Nagle wrote:
Episode 64.
September 30th 2025



Guest: Keith Hahn, BattleTech Developer

News
-Playtest packet 2: mobility is live now
-Out now
--The Corps (BattleCorps Anthology 1) audiobook
--Shrapnel issue 22
-Gothic out tomorrow
-Shrapnel Gothic Special out in October

Discussion
-Keith started correlating rules he’d like to change around 2018
-Some of the rules changes are ones they know will be fine and don’t need to test, like removing the 1 heat per standing attempt.
-They don’t want obscure interactions to break the game, which is part of the open playtest.
-They may have missed some things that work OK in small numbers of games, but flaws may appear after a large number of tests.
-This isn’t a new edition of BattleTech, but there’s also no set definition for what constitutes a new edition. The rules team decided that the thing which would define a new edition is record sheets, and if your old sheets were invalidated that would be the line. This set of changes intends to not invalidate old sheets
-The new rulebook will replace BattleMech Manual and Total Warfare
-There will be supplemental rulebooks to cover all the esoteric stuff
-The core book will have more robust mission generation rules and weather rules covering a standard terran selection of conditions. Wind and rain will be in, but say lava won’t
-The survivability playtest had the two biggest rules changes, so they wanted to put them out there first to get the most eyes on them. Keith talked about how the ammo explosion rules were a divide between “big boom” and “small boom”, and “small boom” was winning out internally. ----They’re going to massage the numbers a bit but they like where the direction is going
-The hit charts rules section is faster, but a lot of feedback shows that it seems easier to delete a mech by concentrating on the side arc. Keith is cautious about it as a result. He’s waiting on feedback from a playtest group of highly competitive players
-Playtest packet 2 is mobility - movement speed, piloting skill rolls. A lot of this came from Randall. The hip hit rules were called out for the timing of damage as a hip hit negates damage that took place before it but not after. Keith asked about where it came from and Randall said it was an attempt to reduce the catastrophic nature of leg hits. He asked if it was possible to cut or change it, and as a result the new changes are an attempt to keep players in the game and active a little longer.
-The changes to the water rules were in part to match up with fiction where mechs are able to do amphibious assaults, walk along the sea bed and so on, but in the game you’re likely to fall over and breach your mech and die.
-Overall the idea is to get a little more mobility and more options
-There’s a couple of weeks left on survivability so you can test both packets together and give feedback
-Packet 3 is gear. Going through mountains of equipment and see if it can be made more usable.
-Randall designed a lot of the new gear in Tacops, and was very cautious to not introduce some new gamebreaking equipment into the game. After 15 years it’s clear some of this stuff is never used and they want to make them more appealing
-Packet 4 is missions, to give players something in the core rulebook, two strangers can use it to create a game that’s independent of faction and era and campaigns
-Packet 5 should be out sooner, it’s “quickplay aerospace”, it will run alongside the other packets
-How do they deal with people who say the changes are too much? One thing Keith said to himself at the start of this is to not argue with the fans. -Everyone has a personal threshold. He’s had people say “why not bring the game into the 20th century”, to update the game to be better and more modern by their standards. Ultimately they’re going to do what they feel is best for the game as they see it, they think it’s good, and it’s fair to say “this is too much for me, I’m out”, though he hopes that doesn’t happen very often.
-BattleMech Manual and Total Warfare will get one more reprint and will still be available for a while. They don’t want people to feel like they have to switch to the new rules, and Keith noted that there are some people out there who still play with the 1994 BattleTech Compendium, people who stick to specific eras, and Keith doesn’t want to tell those people they’re wrong.
-There’s been massive errata to Total Warfare over the years, and a lot of it you wouldn’t notice if you didn’t use those rules. Like there was a massive overhaul to the skid rules, or infantry transports no longer spend MP to deploy troops.
-Report feedback via the playtest feedback site and forum, somewhere like Discord means the feedback is gone in a minute if the channel is moving fast

Q&A
-Is front-loaded initiative being considered? It’s not in the playtest package but they’re considering it. Front-loaded is easier to manage compared to the current working out of ratios
-A legless mech with jump jets in the torso should still be able to attempt to DFA, and in fact should still be allowed to jump: Go to the feedback forum! Keith thinks the mobility rules do cover this, that jumping MP means you’re not immobile.
-Is BV 3 really coming out? Keith calls it 2.5 as it’s a patch to the existing rules as opposed to starting from scratch. BV 2 has known points of failure like fast units with jump jets and pulse lasers, so they’re looking to change those rather than altering everything. It’s largely done but it needs playtesting, though that’s down the road. BV will be mentioned in the new core rulebook but the calculation
-Will the new rulebooks drop the fiction? Probably. Keith loves the sidebars of background material in the 2nd edition rulebook and he likes that more than the chapter heading stories in Total Warfare. There might be one short story at the start of the book if they can get one that overall says BattleTech to them, Keith cited Stephen McCullough's story in one of the core rulebooks about the first BattleMech deployment as an example.
-What are the odds of a random mission generator online? Keith doesn’t know, it would depend on capacity and hosting issues are a thing for CGL right now.
-How can we tell the differences between rulebooks? They want to move to a faster iteration model of the core books. Like Total Warfare has been around for 20 years and they don’t want the new rulebook to last that long. The idea would be that the new core book would be a point where you know there were major changes, though errata will still be a thing, of course.
-What’s the status on canon characters from the Clan Kickstarter? They still don’t have an update. The reporting is a giant mess, they’re having issues pulling the raw data from the old CrowdOx interface. They have the raw data from the Kickstarter side of things, but it wouldn’t cover anyone who upgraded their pledge or bought it as an add-on in the pledge manager
-Can we mix the playtest packets? Yeah, and it’s worth noting if you find a weird interaction between rules
-When all the playtest packets are all done will there be a dialogue and update process after? Not sure. There will be a list of changes and they’ll probably pull in the developer notes to explain some of them. But they’re not sure about having a formal process
-Are there changes in the line to negate jump 7 units, especially pulse lasers? Yes, this will be handled in BV, weapons with hit bonuses will be more expensive, with penalties will be less expensive. There’ll likely be an additional cost on jump 7, but they need to make sure it doesn’t penalise units that move 7 on the ground
-What’s the biggest change you remember since Total Warfare came out? Aerospace has been rewritten multiple times, there’s been a lot of infantry and VTOL updates. So it depends on what parts of the games you play
-Any update on Mercs wave 4? It was meant to start yesterday, they’ll be getting an update in their weekly meeting tomorrow.
-Will units with a conditional defensive bonus like Stealth Armour be getting a BV reduction? Keith would need to double-check, they’re going through a lot of modifier stuff.
-Are there plans to translate BattleTech into other languages? That would be a management question

 AegisGrimm wrote:
So far our entire group likes the Mobility Rules, other than one player who is worried that the ability to back down off of hills will make it too hard to outflank heavies and assaults, as they pop up, fire for a turn or two, and then back down to kill you as you try to crest the hill to attack them.

I'm a big fan of making water more of a playable terrain. Originally, PSR's for every...single...hex (of even level -1 water) that you travelled through, even by walking, was just too much of a slog and slowed the game down too much.

Lorcan Nagle wrote:
Episode 65.
October 7th 2025



Guest: Herb Beas, Gothic Developer

News
BattleTech
-Second Playtest packet - Mobility rules is up now
--Out now:
---The Corps (BattleCorps Anthology 1) Audiobook
---Gothic
---Fox Marauders, Free Gothic fiction for October
---TRO: 3025 commemorative edition is available in PDF form the CGL store. Physical edition sold out on the store, more stock incoming
--October 17th
---Gothic Shrapnel special
-Rem is on the road next week but she should be able to do TND

Discussion
-Herb began playing BattleTech just before the end of high school, he ended up playing a very lengthy campaign which he eventually became the GM for
-He always wanted to be an SF writer so he began pitching ideas to FASA. They sent him a test, which he didn’t realise was a writing test. He figures Chris “Bones” Trossen got this at the same time
-His first writing gigs for FASA were the Hell’s Horses section in Field Manual: Invading Clans and then TRO 3060.
-FASA was his first professional writing gig, his prior credits were writing a comic in his college newspaper and having a story in the college literary journal.
-Herb became Assistant Line Developer to Randall during the Fanpro days. He was writing Touring the Stars and the Planetary info for the MechWarrior Dark Age website. One of the editors gave him the Bertram Habeas pseudonym and Herb ran with it, picturing him as the historian in Monty Python and the Holy Grail trying to figure out the BattleTech universe
-He also wrote for BattleCorps in that timeframe
-He became BattleTech Line Developer shortly after CGL spun up
-After he stepped down as Line Developer he was considered an in-house writer for a while and shifted back to Freelance, and then there was a phase where he just stopped working on the game. A mix of burnout and other factors. He had ended up directing a lot of products instead of writing them and was enjoying stuff like the April Fools jokes more.
-There’s a running joke in CGL that you’ve not made it until you’ve ruined BattleTech, for Herb he ruined it by line developing the Jihad. Even though it was in CGL’s plans for some time. He went with a fog of war approach, the CNN as it happens kind of thing similar to how he remembered the news in the first Gulf War. That was decided in part because of the lack of fiction at the time.
-After he stepped back from CGL, he toyed with some game ideas, he’d pitched some of them to CGL but they passed, but he decided he didn’t want to develop any more and turned them into fiction. He got the first novel finished, decided to have book 2 ready before he published it, and hit writer’s block. He went back to the Quest for Jardine Battlecorps fiction and decided to finish it off. Figuring that he’d burned his bridges with CGL, he decided to put it up on the fanfic section on the BattleTech forum. He got about 2 chapters in when Ray reached out and said “why didn’t you try and sell this to us”, and they negotiated to get it published.
-He decided to mess around with the joke products again, and basically presents them to GCL as a done thing and they say yes or no. If they say no, he puts them up as Fanfic, such as the AtoW adventure featuring the Tetate.
-Herb didn’t pitch Gothic. CGL came to Herb with the idea, but he’s pitched a couple of ideas like Steampunk, Western and World War II. If his Fantasy one gets picked up, it’ll look like the gnome “tech” like World of Warcraft.
-Loren said to play the setting entirely straight, no Nebula California, no characters misjumping into an alternate universe, it’s got to be BattleTech with a twist
-Herb feels the joy of an alternate universe is the contrast. If you get too esoteric, it’s not BattleTech any more.
-Herb knows next to nothing about the 40K setting, he has a couple of friends and a nephew who have dabbled, and when they try to explain it his eyes glaze over. His image of 40K is more meme-influence
-Herb didn’t want to bring in aliens or demons so he looked to classic Gothic literature like Mary Shelly and vampire fiction. He took some hints and throwaway comments in the mainline universe that suggests genetic engineering of lifeforms could happen. The Abominations could destroy humanity if they can’t be controlled
-Herb likes to describe SF as “people create something to make the world better, and it works until the ****** get their hands on it”, and the Succession Lords, especially in Gothic are ******
-People have accused Herb of ripping off Trench Crusade, but he hadn’t even heard of it until he was halfway through. He still doesn’t know if it’s a 40K thing or not
-He saw the Doom parallels during development, to the point of making Doom-style Abominations that he didn’t include in the game.
-Herb was the only person writing Gothic, and he had no other writing commitments. Right now he’s writing Rockets and Rayguns and shepherding the Hallowe’en adventure through the pipeline.
-While Herb isn’t aware of the product timelines, he can guarantee he wouldn’t have been writing anything else if he didn’t do Gothic. Marco’s art was essentially his test to be Art developer so he wouldn’t have been doing anything. So much of the creative work was 100% not done by people

Q&A:
-Favourite character, world or unit to nuke and why? Every nuke that hit Texas in the Jihad was near and dear to his heart. Riga was on the list for something to do with an old IRC chatroom. One thing they were very careful with was Jaime Wolf’s death. They wanted to give him a death worthy of a legend. Herb’s original plan was to have him be nuked but one of the other writers had a better idea and Herb went with it. Probably his favourite one was showing The Master’s death from his POV so you know he’s dead.
-Do the Black Marauder and Phantom of the Arena exist in the Gothic Universe, or are they bleeding over from Gothic into the main universe? Herb loves those ideas. Misjumps are absolutely a thing to cross universes so it could happen. He was interviewed by Sarna and asked what is Bertram Habeas be like in the Gothic universe, and he pointed out he’s not alive yet, but he extrapolated out that he probably would be Abominated. He’d similarly work out the timeline for stuff like the Black Marauder to see if it would be old enough to be in both universes.
-Why break up the FWL in the Jihad? They’ve always had the greatest number of Subdivisions so they’re the one who’d likely survive being broken up, and they were riddled with Blakists. It’s the most logical outcome, especially when the person in charge isn’t who he says he is.
-The Jihad was a maligned era, if you could do it again what would you change? If they could do fiction with post-mortem it would help. A lot of the anger and confusion came from knowing how it would end, especially as Dark Age and BattleTech fans were at odds at the time, it was two different demographics almost. One of the big challenges was writing continuity in both directions - it had to follow on from what went before and fit into Dark Age
-Is Herb the first WOBbie or is another faction your favourite? It’s hard to have a favourite because you want to beat the hell out of them to give them interesting stories. He’s always loved House Steiner and had a great interest in the Hell’s Horses. In developing the Jihad he really started to get interested in them, so he could figure out why they did what they did. For example, their hatred of the Clans wasn’t in the FASA material. He’s even developed some sympathy for the Capellans while trying to add some more depth to them.
-Can Rockets and Rayguns be converted to Crimson Skies? Herb wouldn’t. The biggest problem is that CGL don’t own Crimson Skies. If they were going to do a Crimson Skies type setting in a Continuum product, it’d be the WWII/Dieselpunk one.
-Which rejected alt universe was Herb’s favourite? Except for the Tetate adventure, none of them have been rejected outright yet. He’s really looking forward to the WWII one.
-Sales on Gothic have been good enough that they’re doing an Abominations forcepack, though there are challenges on the production side with the smallest ones.
-Development of the line depends on sales. If Rockets and Rayguns doesn’t do well, they might not do anime, say
-Are any of the Alt Universes set in the ilClan era? There’s a good chance Herb won’t do all the sets, but he’s been aiming at the 3010s-3020s (Rockets and Rayguns will be circa 3020) because that’s Basic tech. You want to keep the game close to the standard and the ilClan era has so much fancy tech things can get messy.

Itxi wrote:

 AegisGrimm wrote:
So far our entire group likes the Mobility Rules, other than one player who is worried that the ability to back down off of hills will make it too hard to outflank heavies and assaults, as they pop up, fire for a turn or two, and then back down to kill you as you try to crest the hill to attack them.

I'm a big fan of making water more of a playable terrain. Originally, PSR's for every...single...hex (of even level -1 water) that you travelled through, even by walking, was just too much of a slog and slowed the game down too much.

Tbh I'm not a fan, water provides a massive benefit of partial cover and can help with cooling. Making it dangerous to cross adds a tactical consideration and value to units which can jump/fly/hover. Maybe remove the PSR or the inability to run, but taking away both just makes water too easy to navigate imo.

 AegisGrimm wrote:

Itxi wrote:

 AegisGrimm wrote:
So far our entire group likes the Mobility Rules, other than one player who is worried that the ability to back down off of hills will make it too hard to outflank heavies and assaults, as they pop up, fire for a turn or two, and then back down to kill you as you try to crest the hill to attack them.

I'm a big fan of making water more of a playable terrain. Originally, PSR's for every...single...hex (of even level -1 water) that you travelled through, even by walking, was just too much of a slog and slowed the game down too much.

Tbh I'm not a fan, water provides a massive benefit of partial cover and can help with cooling. Making it dangerous to cross adds a tactical consideration and value to units which can jump/fly/hover. Maybe remove the PSR or the inability to run, but taking away both just makes water too easy to navigate imo.

I mean, because you still have to make a PSR for every hex you enter when running or jumping, it's still likely to catch up with you at some point. We just felt the times someone had to slog through water when walking really slow things down. When considering non-rivers, everybody just avoided it constantly, or just jumped over it.

 frankelee wrote:
The PSR situation in Battletech Classic has always been borked. These are supposed to be highly trained pilots sitting in the cockpits of invaluable war machines that can run 80+kph no problem, easily outmaneuver tanks, cross rough terrain with ease, yet they walk into some water and there's like a 25% chance they fall over. In addition to several other silly situations.

I think games designers need to balance tactical choice with some sense of the fluff and in-universe realism. In Bolt Action it's a good idea to place your troops behind a tree line cover, I wouldn't want Warlord game designers to go, "Oh well, but now if you're behind a tree line if we don't make it so your troops can accidentally shoot themselves then players won't have a tactical decision to make and will all just be using cover."

It's like, it's better if some things are just naturally better without silly restrictions, and then maybe make the game objectives require you to not stand behind tree lines or stand in a lake apl game.