Today’s offering comes to the blog from an old thread on the Catalyst Game Lab Battletech forum. User Liam’s Ghost proposed the following:
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).
