Originally posted to the CGL Battletech forum as a fanfic story seed.
Michi Noketsuna was the first to give voice to the truth. Warlord Grieg Samsonov and Coordinator Takashi Kurita had betrayed the Dragon’s most loyal servant. True, the life of each samurai belongs to his lord – but this was dishonor beyond the bounds of the Dictum Honorium. The Ryuken had proven that honor was in right thought and right action, not merely right appearances, and this was their reward? It was unconscionable. A samurai from their ranks who sank to such treachery would be fortunate if death were his reward.
Michi Noketsuna was the first to repudiate the covenant that his lord had broken. Free of his oaths to House Kurita, he pledged his loyalty to the man who had forged the Dragon Sword. Where he led, those who remained followed. And if their new master could only cleanse his own honor in death, they would follow there as well.
A single wakizashi was now poised to spill the blood of every surviving samurai of the Ryuken. Michi Noketsuna had found the one point of leverage that could forestall his mentor’s seppuku: responsibility. Unable to condemn loyal men and women to death under the weight of his own karma, Minobu Tetsuhara reluctantly declared himself ronin.
Under a white banner, the Ryuken boarded white ships and lifted from a white world.
As our table gears up to resume play after a lengthy hiatus, the player behind Pettimore and Alexei sent me this slice of Pettimore’s pre-campaign back-story. Posted with author permission.
I don’t recall much of what happened after Krakow, honestly. Most of it’s a blur. I remember bugging out, the team going their seperate ways. I remember Broadstreet handing me that file, looking like the Devil himself had walked on his grave, then he ducked down an alley never to be seen again.
After that, I guess I just sort of drifted. Headed north for a spell. No reason why, just kinda picked a direction. After a while, I wound up in this little town called Ponikla. Seemed like a quiet place to stop. Folks were wary, but friendly. Lot of them gave me the side eye when I spoke Russian, but nobody was outwardly hostile. Met the local padre, fella named Frankowski. Man plays a mean game of chess. He pointed me at this little cottage on the village perimeter, been abandoned since the owner never came back from the front ten years prior. Spent about a week repairing the floors, patching the roof and the like. After about two days my grub was running low, so I went hunting and brought down a buck. I’d just started dressing it out when I heard a branch snap behind me. I drop and turn, next thing I know, my sidearm is leveled on a damned kid! Boy couldn’t have been any older than 14, maybe 15, with an old varmint gun pointed at the ground. Kid was white as a sheet and shaking, probably though I was gonna end him right there. Nobody said nothing for a sec, then the kid dropped the rifle and raised his hands.
The kid’s voice shook as he said “Please, no shoot. I go!” All the time, though, his eyes were fixed on that deer.
“What’s your name, boy?” No response, so I switch to Polish.
“Jak masz na imię?”
“S-Stanislaw.”
“What were you going to do with that rifle, Stanislaw?”
“I am hungry. My friends are hungry. I was trying to find something. Maybe a squirrel, or a rabbit.”
Kid looked half starved, clothes patched up, but he was clean and that rifle was well cared for. Beat all to hell, but oiled and cleaned. Jesus, it was like looking in a mirror.
I lowered the pistol.
“Pick it up. SLOWLY. Good. Now unload it and hand me the rounds.”
The kid reluctantly followed my instructions, then slung the rifle. He only had two rounds in a 5 round mag.
“Pockets too.”
“I only have two bullets.”
“Only two?”
“Tak. One for each squirrel.”
Damn.
“What about later?” I asked.
The kid shrugged. “I make a spear. That is for then. We are hungry NOW.”
Fair enough.
“Come here, kid. You got a knife?”
He slowly pulled out an old pen knife and offered it to me handle first. Again, old but well cared for.
“Help me dress this deer. We’ve got about half an hour till sundown, and about 5 klicks to cover.” I held out the knife. He just stood there. ”You wanna eat tonight? Then get to skinning.”
To his credit, the kid wasn’t bad. Probably never handled anything bigger than a woodchuck, but he had the basics. When we were done, the kid grabbed the bones and wrapped them in an old pillowcase he pulled out of his jacket. ”For soup.”
After, he slung his load and we started off. Kid kept up, didn’t complain either. When we got back to the village, I gave him half the meat, and his rounds back. ”Fair’s fair. You helped you get half.”
He straightened up, lifted his eyes and offered me the knife.
“For the meat.”
“Keep it. Man needs a decent knife, and that’s a good one.”
“Nie. I cannot accept charity. I owe you for the meat.”
Damn. I knew that feeling, all right.
“Tell you what, kid. You know anything about the woods, the area around here?”
He puffed up a bit. “This is my home. I know everything for kilometers around.”
“Then draw me a map. Better yet, show me. I’ll need the lay of the land if I’m staying on here. Do that, and we’re square.”
Originally posted to the CGL Battletech forum as a fanfic story seed.
Casual familiarity and local recruiting had diluted Wolf’s Dragoons’ exoticism by the time we as players first saw them in the 3020s, but when they burst upon the Inner Sphere in 3005, they were strange and foreign. Leaving aside their sheer strength and their equipment’s condition, the Dragoons themselves were mysterious and intriguing. Their accents and speech patterns were reminiscent of recordings of the vanished Star League (not even Clan Goliath Scorpion’s best linguists could completely prepare them to sound like Inner Sphere natives). Their attire, their hairstyles and personal grooming, their universally-superior physical condition, their foodways, their clear unfamiliarity with Inner Sphere conditions and customs… all of these factors, and more, troubled the Federated Suns’ intelligence agencies but drew the attention of the court.
For their part, the Dragoons were part spies, part disaster tourists, and part social archaeologists. The Inner Sphere was not what they’d been briefed to expect. If they were to succeed in their mission, they had to learn to integrate – quickly, and at all levels of society. To this end, Colonel Wolf’s command staff and a select few ristarsahem, rising stars became fixtures of New Avalon’s court scene when not on mission.
Young, Bloodnamed, passionate, not yet hiding heartbreak behind her Black Widow persona… Natasha Kerensky was not immune to the grandeur and spectacle of the court. And First Prince Ian Davion was not immune to her legendary allure. Events proceeded as they often do in such circumstances.
In 3009, as the mercenaries prepared to leave Federated Suns space for Capellan employ, Dragoon MedTechs implanted an anonymous embryo in an Iron Womb.
The Situation: You are one of thirteen major landholding Barons on the mid periphery planet of Foxhaven. Like most of the population, your ancestors came to this world to escape the succession wars. Unlike most of the population, your ancestors brought battlemechs with them, leading to your family's current status as landed nobility. Your noble house is free to operate and rule its lands largely with autonomy as long as you contribute to planetary defense and don't threaten the Grand Duke's Peace.
Your personal forces consist of roughly a company of infantry (foot, motorized, or wheeled mechanized, limited to portable machineguns, recoilless rifles, LAWs/VLAWs, and grenades for support weapons), a collection of repurposed civilian vehicles, a small group of Guardian-B conventional fighters, your fortified castle (complete with gun emplacements and a couple sniper pieces), and the Battlemechs that justify your claim to power.
Your mission is to select the battlemechs you want to complement this group. Your total force may not mass more than 220 tons.
To clearly define the restrictions, you are limited to introductory tech mechs (as defined by the master unit list) available during the late succession war, that appear on the Inner Sphere General faction list. For reference, this link should take you to a master unit list unit search with all of those filters already applied.
In addition to these, you may also select the following LAMs: Stinger STG-A5 and A10, Wasp WSP-100, 100A, and 105, and Phoenix Hawk PHX-HK2. HOWEVER, each LAM counts for double its mass for purposes of your mass limit.
(There's also a Shadow Hawk LAM on planet, but that's part of the Grand Duke's private collection).
My response:
The Barony of Greenfan’s territory centers on the Faith Delta, a fertile alluvial plain surrounding the Faith River’s outlet onto Adams Gulf. The barony’s capital is Nemea, a settlement of some 80,000 citizens constructed near the ancient offshore hulk of the Lion-class DropShip Nemeos Leon. Greenfan is one of Foxhaven’s breadbaskets, with Nemea and the slightly-smaller Adamsport collectively shipping 20% of the world’s fruits and grains.
The delta’s soft alluvial soil and the Faith River’s frequent floods make it difficult to maintain a road network through the barony’s agricultural heartland, so local transportation relies mainly on domestically-produced hovercraft. Nemea dominates the barge trade on the Faith River, while Adamsport, built on more solid ground at the barony’s northern reaches, boasts a robust deepwater shipping facility. A massive deposit of magnetic ore off the delta interferes with navigation and radio communications throughout the region, making Nemea somewhat isolated from greater Foxhaven society; in this, Adamsport is often the barony’s first point of contact for the outside world.
Like almost all of Foxhaven’s ruling class, Greenfan’s nobles are hereditary MechWarriors. Most claim descent from the original complement of the Nemeos Leon, though there’s little documentation to substantiate these genealogies. Through accident or design, the BattleMechs of Greenfan are well-suited to exploit the region’s challenging terrain.
Lady Sofia Antunez, Baroness Greenfan has held dominion since her father’s death in an offshore racing accident twelve years ago. Diminutive like all the Antunez family, Lady Sofia is a noted dancer and fencer. These qualities serve her well in the cockpit of Tisiphone, her family’s Wolverine WVR-6R. The baroness’ gunnery skills are unfortunately not a match for her pilotage, a situation exacerbated by the lack of a domestic ammunition source for Tisiphone‘s GM Whirlwind. She is, however, an excellent tactical commander who knows her territory like the back of her hand. Her teenaged twin heirs, Adele and Francisco, are both training to take over Tisiphone, with the self-declared intention to swap the administrative and martial sides of their baronial duties on alternating months.
Sir Alistair Mackenzie-Morse is Baroness Greenfan’s bodyguard and personal hatchetman. A grizzled duelist in his late 70s, Sir Alistair is pushing the limits of Foxhaven’s medical establishment with his extensive collection of wounds. By all rational standards, he should have retired after the second prosthetic limb, but he has no heir capable of taking up his neurohelmet. His wife carries a rare neurological disorder that triggers lethal feedback from a BattleMech’s control systems, and all five of his children and twelve grandchildren have tested positive for the condition. Until Lady Sofia can convince him to adopt or appoint an heir, he remains bound to Valravn, a Grasshopper GHR-5H that’s returned from the brink of death as often as its pilot has.
Sir Dominik Sokolsky had no intention of becoming a MechWarrior. So far down the Sokolsky line of succession that he couldn’t even see a BattleMech’s cockpit, he was a casual gentleman-farmer who dallied in militia service because certain other young Nemean gentlemen liked the look of a Greenfan dress uniform. When Baron Carlos Antunez’s racing hydrofoil slammed into a spectator barge at 90 knots, the resulting fireball killed every adult Sokolsky except Dominik, who found himself unexpectedly thrust into several roles he’d never desired nor trained for. Although he’s come along well under Sir Alistair’s tutelage, he still lacks confidence at the controls of Red Hussar, the Sokolsky ancestral Wyvern WVE-6N. However, his background as an infantry platoon leader has allowed him to training alongside his former militia comrades with a rare degree of cooperation, going so far as to develop the force’s first stirrings of anti-Mech infantry doctrine.
Dame Janelle Adams is the first Adams in living memory to pilot her family’s venerable Crab CRB-20, Pathfinder. 72 years ago, Baronet Clarence Adams led an unsuccessful plot to overthrow the Antunez family and claim the Barony of Greenfan for himself. The Adams line fell under a writ of attainder, stripping them of their rule of Adamsport in perpetuity and Dispossessing them for three generations. While allowed to train in the baron’s simulator to pass down proficiency, Adams heirs were forbidden upon pain of death from laying so much as a gloved finger on Pathfinder without baronial permission. The proudest – and most terrifying – moment in Dame Janelle’s life was the day she walked her Mech out of the hangar where it had lain dormant for seven decades. As the sole MechWarrior in Adamsport, she knows she’s expected to be a scout and tripwire, not to mount any sort of credible defense on her own, and she’s leaning heavily on Sir Dominik for tactical and political advice.
I was looking heavily at quirks when I put this force and their barony together. The Wolverine and Wyvern are both command units and the Crab also has superior comms gear. This lets them overcome a lot of the area’s natural interference to maintain communications where an invading force wouldn’t. Also, all three of the Mechs based in Nemea are jump-capable, which helps them out when operating in the marshes and soft alluvial soil of the delta. The Crab isn’t a jumper but it has more stable terrain and a road network to use. If called up for the planetary defense mission, this lance would likely deploy via barge (if going upriver) or merchant vessel (if forces were assembling at another coastal port).
As a general rule, I don’t post published freelance material. This is an exception – Bruce Baugh, one of the developers involved with shoehorning it into print, posted it as a teaser forThe Book of Oblivion (Wraith 20th Anniversary Edition), the book in which it saw publication. As it’s already been released into the wild, I don’t have an ethical issue re-posting it here.
This serves as the introduction to the section in BoO (boo scary boo!) in which I got to write about ghosts in disasters. I’m an emergency manager in my day job, so this may have been the apotheotic intersection of my “normal” and gaming work. That’s probably one of the best pieces of game writing I’ve done, and I’ll always be a little sad that it’s tucked away in a supplement that maybe twelve people will ever read.
The opening image had been stuck in my head since the summer of 1996. I can’t thank Bruce enough for giving me the opportunity to get it out at a time in my life when I could write something like this. Catharsis, in an odd way that only other writers truly get.
I don’t do a lot of fiction work. This is one of two or three pieces I’ve ever written that I actually liked at the time and still like after the fact.
Early morning over the wounded city and our pilot is flying blind.
Five crews are on this op, ferried in on the last Midnight Express run, our birds tarped down on flatcars. We briefed before dawn in the railyard as the train pulled out, taking everyone who can’t or won’t fight or work. Siege conditions: evacuate the noncombatants. Oblivion is hungry today.
Blackwell is in the right seat, visor down to hide what’s left of his face after it lost a fight with a Vietnamese 57mm shell. Thankfully, it doesn’t affect his aviating. We’re in a slow clockwise orbit, scanning for survivors through two-bell winds and everything they carry. The living don’t know what’s coming – the forecast says the first bodies won’t hit the ground for another six hours – but here, the Maelstrom is already building.
“Got a tasking,” McGuire murmurs from the left seat where she’s running comms in a shared waking dream. “Augur says three on a rooftop by the university.”
Blackwell double-clicks the intercom by way of acknowledgement and breaks off to point us in that direction. It’s a short flight, even with bone hail clattering off the windshield, and Castaneda and I double-check our safety lines and lean out the doors to search.
“Fast-mover inbound,” McGuire reports. “On our six, going for the tail.”
I crane my neck and see a streak of green teeth and black robes coming at us. True to form, it’s relying on a living memory of aerodynamics, and it vomits out a tongue like a barbed anchor chain to ensnare our tail rotor and spin us out of the sky. Blackwell just grunts and holds us steady, giving the Spectre an easy target.
A noise like a handful of rocks dropped in a blender overpowers a brief squawk of dismay as Stygian steel replacement blades don’t even slow down. The chain wraps and pulls its owner in, then the Spectre hits the fan and rips apart. We barely feel a shudder. Laminate rotors were the first thing we replaced, dumbass.
“Mark, mark, mark. Torch at eight o’clock.” While I’ve been watching the show, Castaneda’s been on mission. Blackwell brings us around as I start checking my gear. We don’t want to put the bird within reach of what’s in the water, so I’ll rope down and we’ll winch those wraiths in one at a time.
That’s the plan for the next thirty seconds, anyway. I’m about to go on the line when the screaming from below – can’t hear you over the Pathos turbine, guys – intensifies. Then the wind gives us a shove toward a bell tower as a stroke of lightning splits the air where we were. I grab for a handhold and twist toward the door in time to see the first caul bob to the water’s surface, and I realize I’m hearing the screams from across the Shroud. That means the forecast was wrong and people are dying now, and this storm is about to eat us and everyone else in it.
The smart thing to do would be to firewall it and RTB, but if I were smart, I wouldn’t be in the back of a relic Huey in a Maelstrom. So instead, I lock eyes with Castaneda. “Plan B?” I ask even as she’s reaching for my harness.
“We gotta go out. We don’t have to come back,” she confirms, and then we’re out the door at a totally unsurvivable altitude. Her wings come out at the same time as my hatchets and as she turns, I can see a nihil chewing away the corner of the building. Our survivors aren’t screaming any more. They’re too busy fending off the cousin of the thing our tail rotor shredded. It’s a race to see whether the Spectre or the Labyrinth gets them first.
The player behind Magda sent me this as her contribution to the 15 August holiday downtime. It’s posted with her permission (and with the award of some delicious XP).
For context, Magda and her Cook specialty have taken over management of Ponikla’s communal cooking arrangements. Her normal crew is three of the village’s elderly ladies and one of the rescued teenagers from the railyard. They’re doing this for her own good…
Magda stands outside the door of the hostel’s kitchen. Her kitchen. Which is currently being blockaded by two less-than-imposing figures. Tamara’s in the middle of a growth spurt; her spindly elbows jut out as she crosses her arms. Old Antonina’s eyes glint sternly behind her scratched glasses.
“I need to start the bread,” Magda says, confused.
“No, you don’t,” Antonina says. “It’s a rest day. Go rest.”
“It’s a feast day. We need to—”
Antonina waves a gnarled hand to silence her. “The last rest day was two weeks ago, and you spent it in here, cooking. If you’re not out scouting or harvesting, you’re in here stirring the soup. You need a day off. We’ll handle everything.”
Magda looks past Antonina for support, but comes up empty. Kazimiera’s wrinkles deepen as she grins and nods decisively. Over by the stove, Josefa glances toward Magda and flips one hand. Off with you, girl.
“If you’re sure…” Magda says.
The door closes in her face, firmly but not unkindly.
Magda looks around the tiny courtyard. Rest? She walks to the gate and stands there for a moment, trying to think of something to do that wouldn’t involve work. Maybe just…go for a walk? She circles around to the hostel’s front door, climbing the stairs to her cubby of a room. When she comes out, she’s got a small pack on her back.
She negotiates at the kitchen door briefly. They still won’t let her in, but Josefa approvingly provides a picnic packet, along with a canteen of water. Magda tucks them into her pack and sets off, hiking northwest through the trees.
Soon enough, she reaches the river and walks upstream until she finds a large, spreading oak. Feeling odd, she climbs up among the branches. She hasn’t climbed a tree since she was a child, but it’s here, and she’s here, and there’s a perfect perch on a large branch not too high up. She settles herself with her back to the trunk, with her pack in front of her.
The river ripples placidly. A warm, gentle wind caresses the long grass on the riverbank. Clouds drift across the sky.
It’s so lovely, so serene, it makes Magda’s chest hurt. A tear drips down one cheek, then the other. She holds herself taut for a moment, then gives up. There’s no one here to see or care. She curls around her backpack and sobs.
It shouldn’t be so beautiful here. How could anything dare to be so peaceful in a world gone utterly insane? In another time, she’d have wanted to share this view with someone, but everyone from before is gone, either dead or lost. At Christmas five years ago, her grandparents’ farm had been a chaotic, jubilant mass, at least fifty people, counting herself and her siblings, parents, uncles, aunts, cousins…not to mention the babies and the people who weren’t family but might as well have been.
Maybe some of them are still alive, somewhere.
She can’t remember the last time she cried like this, huge, racking, coughing sobs, until her throat hurts and salt water runs down her arms. Finally, the ache in her chest eases, and she raises her head, sniffling.
The river burbles, wind riffles the grass, and the clouds float on. Nothing has changed.
Everything has changed.
She opens her pack and pulls out the canteen with quivering hands. After all that foolishness, she’s probably dehydrated. She takes a few careful sips, then hangs the canteen strap off a branch. Josefa’s packet proves to contain a few strips of dried meat, two wheat rolls, a little ceramic tub of fresh cheese, and another of plum jam. A bundle of cloth secured with twine holds what must be the last of the fresh cherries. Despite herself, she smiles through her tears at the kindness.
She remembers buying cherries in a grocery store. Just a little treat. She hadn’t realized then what an unimaginable luxury it truly was.
So much is gone, and wrong, and strange, and not what it was. There was before, and now there is after.
She takes another sip from the canteen and leans her aching head against the warm trunk behind her. She’s tried very hard, up to now, not to think about either of the two worlds. There was simply work to be done, and she did it.
Why? Why does she keep trying? She’s never thought of herself as a survivor. The people who could make it in this new world are people like…like Minka, tough and fearless and capable. Or like Red, whose skills are welcomed and valued anywhere he goes.
The murky river swirls below her. She snaps off a dry twig and lobs it toward the water. It lands without a splash and disappears.
If she never returned to the village, would it matter?
The wind picks up, hissing through the oak leaves, and a branch taps sharply against her leg. She looks down just as the carpet of leaves below rises up, dancing across the ground. The way they spin…she shuts her eyes tightly and clutches the sturdiest branch, holding on against a sudden surge of dizziness.
The wind dies down again. She doesn’t move. Scenes play themselves on the insides of her eyelids: Zenobia and Red, asking Josefa where Magda had gone, why she hadn’t come back. A search party, Leks and Minka and young Miko. Tamara begging to come along to help. Antonina holding her rosary in both hands, a stricken look on her weathered face.
No. She can’t do that to them.
Her friends would put themselves in danger, roaming around to look for her. She can’t tell herself it wouldn’t happen that way. It would.
She matters to them.
They matter to her.
The wind breathes another sigh, ruffling her hair and drying the tears on her cheeks. She opens her eyes and slowly relaxes back against the sturdy trunk.
Antonina can run the kitchen if needed, but she’s not able to climb a cherry tree or shoulder a rifle. Tamara is nigh-ungovernable, with her teenage overconfidence, but she listens to Magda. And what would the others have done in that last fight with the ZOMO if Magda hadn’t turned the BTR’s gunner into barszcz before he could fire at them?
Maybe she’s not ready to think about before or after. But she doesn’t have to. There’s just now.
She pulls a cherry out of the tiny sack and pops it into her mouth, eating around the pit. She’ll save the pits in the sack and bring them back home. Maybe there will be a good place in the village to plant them.
