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Money

2022-04-08T21:27:52Z

2607:FB90:6CC9:4561:4142:C3A:928E:CE94:

'''Money''' is a monetary token used for trade. Bartering using resources was typically not always a reliable form of commerce, as value of goods typically varies from place to place; one area may favor the goods you're trying to trade with, while another area might consider it worthless. A centralized form of payment was often established in place of it so that people would have an easier time in gauging the value of a product and trying to pay for it. Lots of things have been used as money from fancy shells to grain to plugs of tobacco to valuable lumps of metal to notes backed by the authority of government. MOST IMPORTANTLY, money allows YOU to buy [[miniatures|cool toys]] so that you can become part of /tg/ while keeping another [[Games Workshop|money-whoring company]] alive. Show them your love of currency by paying for your next box of Space Marines with a Yap Stone.

That said, money only works if the place you're trying to spend it at has use for it (after all, all the money in the world is useless if you can't get anything with it). A town with a well-connected trading post will welcome your coins with open palms, while an isolated village in the middle of nowhere would find those hunks of metal to be worthless and would prefer you give them something actually useful (such as supplies or bullets) in exchange instead.

==A Brief History of Money==

The basic idea of money emerged in the Late Bronze Age. Before then people would give gifts and do favors for their neighbors, they would barter goods with other groups and governments would pay people to work in food and goods that they collected in taxes or commissioned. A few goods were more valuable for long distance trade (salt, cloth, metals, Cowrie shells, Cacao beans in Meso America) though for the most part wealth was calculated in terms of food. Coinage emerged as a way to quantify the value of food, instead of departments having to move 10 bushels of grain from each other's storehouses they could simply give 10 Shekels, which could be redeemed at a central granary.

Gold and silver in particular were attractive as they could both be worked easily, did not rust (in the conventional sense anyway), and appeared to exist in a fixed ratio to each other (17.5 silver to 1 gold on Earth, close-ish to the theoretical ratio from stellar sources). This made them good to use as a token that could be universally exchanged, but gold and silver are still heavy to lug around for transactions, while being all too easy to carry away by robbers.

So what people settled on was trading their stuff for precious metals, and then storing those precious metals in a bank and trading notes around that represented precious metals. Of course, this had some teething problems, the earliest banks (and some recent ones) weren't very trustworthy. Eventually governments got a bit greedy themselves and decided that pinning currency values to metals was limiting their ability to spend irresponsibly, and so they removed that connection and that's where we stand today. As a result, most currencies are based on national government promises to fulfill monetary bonds (aka IOU bills) in the hypothetical event some stockholder wants to cash out as well as the "relative" strength of the target economy where stronger bills are useful for investments, imports, or savings while weaker bills are useful for buying raw materials, exports, or paying for cheap labor. TLDR, modern money has value basically because people believe it has value, and as long as that's the case we're okay. When it's not the case, the result is Venezuela, where the Bolivar is worth less than WoW gold. Some people are hyping up cryptocurrencies or digital currency as the future due to decentralization, resistance to forgery from blockchain encryption, unique digital signatures, or lack of paper, plastic, or metalworking. On the other hand, such things only work if you have digital infrastructure and a reliable power grid to keep it all chugging along, and of course people willing to take it as money and the whole crypto set-up has basically been a speculative measure.

==Money and /tg/==
Being a tabletop hobbyist, money plays a huge role in the life of every neck beard. If you don't have money you can't build your army, without your army you cannot participate in tabletop match. The require products for this hobby comes with miniatures, paint and codex. They are all damn expensive, especially when they are all measured in euro (which is currently the most expensive currency of all).

Suffice to say, wargaming/miniature modelling is a first world middle class/upper middle class hobby, but mostly for younger audience until a certain age above 25? because once a person is past a certain age threshold, they'll be too busy at work than spending time on their hobby, or not [[Chris-Chan|because they could just become a lazy manchild who doesn't work but use the warefare or their parent's money like the fucking parasite they are]]. A recent move was made by [[GW]] to attract younger audience into the bloody world of 40k, with [[skub|improvements such as making newer edition less complicated,]] [[Ultramarine|advertising their games using smurf-sues]] or [[Warhammer Adventures|introduce the grimdark world of 40k to a much younger audience]]. This turns out to be a great moves, as it turns the children into plastic crackhead, forever bothering their parent to buy them a new box of space marines. Some hobbyist with little income prefers to buy their miniatures one by one when they have the money to spare, until they can finally compete with other player......only to bitch online when their favorite faction lose to a bunch of [[Tau|blue face space communist]].

[[pirate|Piracy]] is often seen as an alternative to currency transactions for obtaining RPG products. Unfortunately this can normally only obtain digital goods, though with a 3D printer miniatures can now be pirated as well. This is illegal, but rarely enforced past the provider if you're not stealing movies from a major distributor or something written by a total sperg like [[Zweihander]]. Another alternative is the use of simulators like ''[[Tabletop Simulator]]'' or one of the many card game simulators, which can allow copyright infringing representations of physical objects to be used.

==Money in games==
Money is a common feature in many games. It's an idea you would naturally be familiar with, is a natural part of almost any complex agricultural society not designed by the dirtiest of hippies and is for providing incentive to players in story creation. On top of that is easy to express with a pen and paper. Your Paladin has acquired 50 Golden-Wombats so add fifty Golden-Wombats to their inventory, you subtract 30 Golden-Wombats from your inventory when you buy a new shield from a blacksmith and so forth.

In settings where the system of currency has collapsed or is non-existent, like a post-apocalyptic world, money is often eliminated, forcing people to stick to bartering. Alternatively, a new "currency" based on a useful item develops, such as [[Fallout]] system where trade is conducted using the water standard (the Water Merchants will trade a fixed volume of clean water for a cap) backed bottlecaps, while [[wikipedia:Metro 2033|Metro 2033]] universe has people trading in pre-war ammunition after Moscow's economy was obliterated in the setting's nuclear war. Gold, merely being pretty and useful for making electronics that can't be made anymore, rarely retains much value after the apocalypse (Silver, which is useful for its anti-microrobial properties and making mirrors, would actually be more useful, but this is rarely touched upon).

In setting like Path of Exiles, where the player is but an exile, rejected unto the cruel lawless continent of Wraeclast. The inhabitants there has an unique currency system where they trade useful magical orbs that can changes the properties of the weapons and armors. Each orbs has their own value based on their ability to either change or improve the properties of the gears, and this one orb "that can randomize a rare item's property" is worth to 10 of that orb, whose ability is to "randomize the property of a magical items" (similar to 1000$ > 100$ > 10$)

===Money in Fantasy settings===
The default type of money in you usual fantasy world are coins following a simplified version of the Roman System with (in descending order of value) gold, silver and copper pieces, sometimes with platinum on top of gold (even though it wasn't worth much till more modern times) and electrum between gold and silver (even though the percentage of each metal would be impossible to determine and only hold more value than silver from a state's backing and assurance of a particular degree of purity). Such systems are usually made by people who are either lazy or don't hold the nature of local currency to be of much concern of the worlds of the story that they're writing. Those that go more in depth or want to differentiate different cultures and civilizations will add different types of money. Those who want to simplify things even further simply stick with gold. Gold's density is usually left unaddressed; a typical "fantasy coin" (1" diameter, 1/8" thick -- gold is too soft to be made into thin coins) of pure gold would weigh a little over an ounce (31 grams to be precise), so a sack of 100 coins (enough to buy a decent sword or an adventure's worth of supplies) would weigh nearly seven pounds, and never mind lugging around 1000 gold coins (68 pounds) to buy a suit of armor.

Another challenge of gold specifically is that one of the main goals of [[alchemist]]s was working out a way to transmute common metals into gold. In a few fantasy worlds there are various types of magic that can do this. Such magics would inevitably lead to inflation. This might explain why gold coins are used as a day to day currency in many fantasy worlds when in real life it was unusual for people who were not merchants, nobles, high end artisans or scribes to deal in gold rather than in silver or copper.

Most common among the more exotic options for currency in fantasy settings is souls. Trading in souls is an extremely popular trait for any evil society with good grasp of magic, especially extraplanar beings. More rarely valuable items, that are for some reason valued the same everywhere, like art or food can be used as a money equivalent. Most adventurers turns this kinda thing into cash the first chance they get.

For some reason dragons also like to sit in piles of gold and gems, which makes them targets for adventurers trying to seek wealth.

Wouldn't it be great if coins were made of harder, less dense metals so they could be thinner and lighter? Or heck, we could just dispense with the metal and write down how much we're worth or spending on pieces of something really lightweight, like paper. Nah, this is crazy talk!
[[File:Discworld Money.jpg|thumb|300px|right|...or is it? (Ankh Morpork Banknotes from Making Money)]]

===Money in Sci-fi settings===
In futuristic settings, money is usually just a single unit (typically called "credits") and largely operate on a digital level instead of people having to give a form of bank note or coin. In most sci-fi settings that include aliens with their own currency system, the proverbial credit is usually the standardized form of money people pay with that has a direct equivalent to their home system. Basically similar to what the European Union did with the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro Euro], but on a larger scale and somehow managing to go decades without a member state's financial issues fucking it up.

In a few science fiction societies such as the Federation from [[Star Trek]] and [[The Culture]] have done away with money, with economies which are so efficient that it is easy to provide fulfill material needs due to robots, replicators, fabrication machines and similar there is not really a reason to pay people to work so society just provides people with what they want/need for free with all work being voluntary. The problem of such a [[Wikipedia:Post-scarcity economy|"post-scarcity" economy]] is that creativity (without dangerously intelligent AI), land/space, entertainment, sexual gratification (without sexbots or the like), and attention will still be in finite supply. In less ideal situations often posited society gets dominated by megacorportations in which the working masses toil for scrip, coupons which can be redeemed at company stores for company products. This sort of thing did happen in the 19th century a lot as a way to keep the workers in line in company towns.

====Money in 40k====
In WH40K; currency is not completely detailed upon. The Imperium officially runs on a feudal system with no unified currency system, where each world must pay tithes of various resources such as food, minerals, hardware, manpower.....etc, instead of paying in coin. Although several publications say that each Imperial world has their own local currency system, not to mention that guardsmen also get paid with actual money (although unspecified). Most people typically just accept that Imperial currency is either called "credits" or "thrones" (throne gelt, specifically, and yes that does indeed mean they are [[Golden Throne]]s), since they're the most prevalent.

Additionally, every human of the Imperium is indebted to the Emperor at birth, as the only reason they're alive is because of the Emperor's continued sacrifice upon the Golden Throne. Thus, every citizen of the Imperium is considered a currency of the Emperor, and can be spent by the billions to preserve it, under the hopefully competent command of one of his generals. That said, wasting something that belongs to the Emperor himself is heresy, so while a commander or an Inquisitor may have the authority to spend that much if needed, they better have a good reason for it (those billions of guardsmen you sent to die on a pointless objective that did no favors to the Imperium? They could have instead been used in active, high-priority warzones like Cadia or Armageddon. You have potentially cost the fate of the entire Imperium through your incompetent squandering of His faithful servants, execution for such a grave offense.)

For Orks, they use [[toof|teef]], which can be obtained by krumping a git and yanking his chompers out. To orks; bigga teef means bigga value, so Orks who wants the killiest gubbins from the meks typically has to pick on someone his own size, or someone larger. Orks also run on a bartering system, where one can trade something of value; like salvage or resources to get what they want. Because teeth rots overtime, it cannot be hoarded for long, and has to be spent constantly to get the most out of it. And because no Ork can get rich by just sitting on his ass, this helps keep an Ork band eternally thriving as the constant fighting helps stimulate the Orks' growth. Some Ork bands also do not care if the teeth isn't from an Ork, so long as it looks like teeth and is zoggin 'uge. Its for this reason the Tyranids are another popular source of teef.

====Money in Star Wars====
In [[Star Wars]] the Republic Credit was the standard currency Galaxy wide, backed by the InterGalactic Banking Clan. Credits primarily exist electronically but also exist as untraceable, secure chips with a number of credits on them and (very rarely) metal coins. The Credit weakened toward the end of the Republic and many alternate local currencies popped up, most notable the Hutt Peggat, which was coined in gold and held a value at 40 times the credit and came to dominate Outer Rim transactions. When the Clone Wars broke out the Credit hit its lowest point as the Confederacy began printing currency that was broadly accepted, but this Confederate Credit died with its printer. The Empire replaced the Republic Credit with the Imperial Credit and ended the decades of low faith in the Credit. The Alliance to Restore the Republic issued its own credit, but it held little (if any value) for outside transactions and they primarily used the Imperial Credit till they became the New Republic. The ensuing Balkanizing of the Galaxy as the New Republic began to officially control worlds and the remaining Imperials broke into a maze of factions created another mess of currencies. Since no two governments considered the other legitimate, traders had to rely on commodities to make transactions. This lasted till the Pellaeon–Gavrisom Treaty brought peace between the New Republic and Imperial Remnant. In the times before the Republic went full retard in the Ruusan Reformation 1000 years before the Battle of Yavin, the system is pretty much the same as writers don't want to bother with numismatics. After the Pellaeon-Gavrisom Treaty the same policy is taken for the sake of convenience.

====Money in Battletech====
Battletech has an unusually developed currency system based on an actually reasonable scarce commodity. The universal currency is the C-bill, which is issued by ComStar and has a fixed value backing of exactly 1 millisecond of FTL data transmission over the ComStar network (enough to send a picture or a few pages of text). Since virtually everyone who wants to send data around must pay in C-bills, this makes it universally fungible. Still each individual state has their own set of currency and they each have their own exchange rate in C-bills.

===Money in (relatively) Modern Settings===
While barter is typically associated with extremely primitive societies, it has seen use far beyond what people realize. In the Thirteen Colonies, hard currency was in short supply due to limited minting and a tendency to leave across the pacific and not come back. Heavy regulation on producing currency (one of the many, many causes of the Revolution) forced the colonists used barter, trade goods, "I owe you"s, and foreign coins of subjective exchange rates for trade and wages, a system that was reinforced by barter with Indians. Barter in the colonies was so developed that Matthew Patten's diary (a major primary source for the period) was largely spent keeping track of what he owes people and what people owed him.

===Money in Even More Modern Settings===
In theory, representing the currency system of an [[Industrial Revolution]] or later setting should be easy, as it's essentially a system everyone already knows. In practice, real monetary systems are far too volatile to be realistically represented in a game, as values can vary heavily not only year to year, but month to month and place to place. Further complicating things is that real money costs aren't really aligned with the gameplay needs of player characters or balance, and a majority of income is typically spent on living expenses that don't impact the game at all. As such, several systems have created systems to avoid dealing with this.

''[[D20 Modern]]'' introduced an abstract wealth score that allowed ignoring costs for minor purchases and not keeping track of modern fiances. This system is a total clusterfuck. Among its flaws are the high degree of randomness, which in turn requires the DM be present for character generation pre-errata (post-errata you can take 10 there to avoid it, though large purchases still have random costs), odd values, and generally being more unwieldy than the basic addition/subtraction it replaced. ''d20 Apocalypse'' introduced a barter system, but it was non-comprehensive, geared toward a very specific setting, and largely dart board in its value.

The original, White Wolf 3.5 version, and fan-made [[DM's Guild]] incarnations of ''[[Masque of the Red Death]]'' all use relatively standard for the medium depictions of wealth. The [[RPGA]] variant however, takes the interesting approach of giving characters an amount of money between adventures and declaring it represented merely their ''disposable'' income, explicitly rejecting the idea of them being pennyless hobos and leaving their personal finances to behind the scenes. Another interesting thing done by this version of the game is it explicitly encouraged use of period mail order catalogs as a supplement to its meager equipment list. Sadly, this came ''before'' they were all digitized and easily obtained as free, public domain, PDFs on the internet and required reproductions or the distant hope of finding one in a library. Made worse by the RPGA requiring players bring all used sources, so its suggestion of checking the library is instantly rendered non-viable.

Some games have ditched use of any form of currency to buy effects entirely, and instead price things purely on their mechanical effect. d20 Modern's child ''Spycraft 2.0'' has player characters get access to new and more powerful gadgets as they level up. This system is abstract and can represent issued gear, stuff the character created, or just what they can spare for their adventures. ''[[Mutants & Masterminds]]'' has equipment (generic mundane items) and gadgets (unique, special, items) priced in character points based purely on what gameplay effect they generate: Items that produce Ranged Damage 4 costs a fixed number of points, regardless of if it's a space blaster or magic bracers that let you throw lightning bolts. A character can be wealthy for a low cost, reflecting that while it may occasionally enable creative solutions (buy out the only company that can supply an important component the bad guy needs) it's not going to make Godzilla go away.

[[Category:History]][[Category:Not related]]

Classical Period

2022-04-08T21:20:10Z

2607:FB90:6CC9:4561:4142:C3A:928E:CE94: /* Notes */

[[File:Life in ancient rome.jpg|250px|thumb|left|Life in Ancient Rome]]
In the Mediterranean world/fertile crescent the [[Bronze Age]] is often said to have ended rather abruptly in a massive calamity called ''The Late Bronze Age Collapse''. Advanced civilizations which had cities, written language, mathmatics and fine products that had stood for thousands of years were swept away or faced major setbacks rather suddenly around the 12th century BCE. Exactly why this happened is [[skub|a matter of contention]] and probably not just one thing (crop failure, foreign invaders [often called "The Sea People"], civil unrest and compounding breakdowns were most likely part of it) but regardless the result of which was that society took a fair number of steps back. But things bounced back as a new set of civilizations came about, though considerably different ones from what came before in Greece, the Levant and Italy around 800 BCE or so. Thus began the '''Classical Period'''.

The Classical Period is the time of the Greek City States and the [[Roman Empire|Roman Republic and Empire]] and lasted to about the fifth century CE. What started out as a few minor city states here and there grew into civilizations which would flourish in art, philosophy, engineering, architecture, medicine and more. While many of these states would have Kings at various points in their history, there was also a fair deal of experimentation with various forms of elected government. Even as the classical period would come to an end with the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

The Classical Period is firmly the '''Iron Age'''. Iron had been worked before, Meteoric iron had been worked every now and again for thousands of years and occasionally a few skilled craftsmen in the Bronze Age could make a few bits of it even though it was brittle and expensive and mostly used as a sign of status (king Tut was buried with an iron dagger for such reasons). Near the Bronze Age Collapse the Hittites had begun smelting and working iron on a larger scale for more practical purposes such as tools and weapons(and ''absolutely wrecked'' a far greater Egyptian army at Kadesh when the iron shields and swords broke the Egyptians' copper weapons like twigs), but it was only after the collapse that Iron Working really became common. Iron has a higher melting point than copper, and the simple wood fired furnaces of the Bronze Age just were not up to the task of processing it in meaningful amounts. If you make a large tube furnace, feed it charcoal, iron ore and oxygen with bellows, you can get it just hot enough to end up with lumps of semi-molten iron goo that can be forged. Regular iron was comparable to bronze in quality for many purposes, but unlike bronze which required two rarer metals that you often had to trade for, iron ore was common as muck. Even so, bronze still found a fair bit of use well into the classical period. After all, the big deal about iron swords is not that they are ''better'' than bronze ones, absolutely speaking, but now everyone in your army can easily have one. It would also ensure chariots could now pull better armored soldiers with a lot more ammunition with far fewer risks, but by that moment horses got bred big enough to just carry the fighter.

== Notes ==
* This whole deal is a western thing. In [[China]] and [[India]] and so forth things were going along their own paths removed from all this. Though it should be pointed out that roughly around the same time that Rome existed, the Qin and Han dynasties United China for the first time, being their equivalent of a “foundational” regime that would set political and cultural precedents for centuries to come. Before the west was done with this era though, the Han collapsed and China entered the bloody Three Kingdoms period before being formed into the Jin dynasty.
* During this time in [[Japan]] the Yayoi period (starting around 1,000 BCE) happened as migrating people from the mainland came to the island chain [[rip and tear|assimilating]] the earlier semi-agricultural Jomon peoples and is considered the start of Japanese Civilization as we'd know it.
* Writing became more common during this time period. Beforehand in the bronze age literacy was the domain of scribes and a few priests and nobles and existed primarily for purposes of administration first and religious purposes second. In the classical world it was fairly common for men and women who were not at the bottom of society to know their letters and using them much more widely. Probably because the Phoenicians developed the basics of phonetic writing during the Dark Age and it's easier to learn a few dozen symbols that represent short sounds than hundreds of symbols which represent syllables and words. Literacy would decline after the classical period.
* Navies emerged as states realized the advantages of travelling over water as opposed to land, and pirates and enemy ships had to accounted for.
* Philosophy and political science were at the fore. Every conceivable society was attempted, from Athenian democracy, to monarchies and oligarchies, Rome's landed citizen republic, the theocratic dynasties in Egypt, and the brutal warrior-communes of Sparta. Every society was aware of the growing masses in the cities and the need to keep the populace placated, whether through expanding franchise, brutal tyranny, manipulative privation, brazen demagoguery, ''panem et circenses'', or a combination thereof.
* The iconic marble statues were originally painted with colourful paints. The paints have just decayed much quicker than the stone they covered.

== The appeal of the Classical Period ==
Frankly the modern world has a serious Boner for this period. The link we have to the Bronze Age cultures is a bit tenuous at best, but The West sees the Greeks and the Romans as our fore bearers. People like the idea of Greek Philosophers discussing and debating the nature of the world and morality, of Romans forging order from chaos, spreading civilization and building magnificent buildings that stand to this day, Athenian Democracy and Spartan military excellence. Of course, that view is overly romantic and overlooks the nastier side of the period, from [[slavery]] to rampant xenophobia and sexism (especially with the Greeks who only had a few men voting to the point that the "democracy" was little more than an oligarchy of a few) to the fact that this could be a rather brutal period with a lot of pig headed stupidity at the time. Many people have tried to emulate the better notions like bureaucracy and checks on power and build on them.

It helps that we actually have a fair bit of information about this time from first-hand accounts. Historians have to parse through a smattering of tablets and decorations on walls for the Bronze Age, much of which they can't read. In this period we have a good index of this time period, from Greek poems and plays to biographies and histories. Even if said writings aren't very objective, they make filling in the blanks a hell of a lot easier and gives us insights into a lot of different people, which means we have a lot of characters to get insights on how people got along back then.

Finally, there is something of a mix of the modern and the ancient in the Classical Age that you don't get in the medieval period. In Rome people lived in apartment blocks, had sewers to take away their filth, had theaters and coliseums to keep them distracted, and (if they had said status) had a conception of their role in society as citizens with legal rights and listened to political rhetoric and heard satire that's not too different from what someone in a first world country would hear as opposed to how a medieval peasant or knight would. Bob-every-Roman puts in a hard day's work selling olive oil so that when game day comes around he can go down to the arena with his bros, drink wine and bet on the gladiators.

Mind you, this stuff existed in a world where slavery was normal and unremarked on. Romans unironically complained about all the slaves taking their jobs, and some portion of them actually had a point: the modest farmers who got screwed by big landowners and aristocrats who bought them out while they were at war and then used their slaves to profit off of the land ended up creating a big urban poor population that was the cause of many of the late republic problems. Having criminals fight to the death was seen as prime penology (and good entertainment) and people sacrificed sheep so that next years' grape crops would yield a prime vintage was a regular part of religious lives.

== Classical Period inspired Games, Factions and Settings ==
The Elder Scrolls: The Cyrodiilic Empire is inspired, mostly, by that of Rome, right on down to the naming customs and military organization. Their government, however, appears to be much more of a centralized absolute monarchy as opposed to Rome's forms of government even in the late Imperial era, as there were very few cases of Emperors being created by right of birth (the ones that were almost always sucked as rulers).

Some Tilean city-states in [[Warhammer Fantasy Battle]] (especially Remas and Luccini) are also inspired by the Classical Period.

== See Also ==
* [[Roman Empire]]
* [[Hoplite]]

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Dark Age

2022-04-08T21:19:14Z

2607:FB90:6CC9:4561:4142:C3A:928E:CE94: /* Notes */

[[File:Dark age port.jpg|300px|thumb|left|Brick and Concrete have given way to Waddle and Daub]]
The Western [[Roman Empire]] is generally said to have fallen in 476 CE, which was in of itself part of a long gradual decline as the Empire fell for a wide variety of internal and external reasons which are beyond the scope of this article and indeed are still extensively debated by historians. The central Government broke down, barbarians tribes such as the Huns, the Vandals, and the Goths invaded and took over and many urban centers that grew under Roman rule withered on the vine as their people fled to the countryside and a fair bit of higher learning was lost in Western Europe. For the sake of curating this marked the end of the [[Classical Period]] period which lasted until about 1000 or so called '''The Dark Ages'''.

During this time warlords carved out new kingdoms, handing conquered lands out to their favored warriors as they went who'd tax peasants and used that money to buy [[Mail]] and [[helmet]]s and [[Horse]]s, gradually morphing into the first [[Knight]]s. They also made alliances with the Catholic Church, which arose from the ashes of Rome offering its services in placating the peasants, rebuilding society and doing things that required book learning in exchange for their aid in spreading the faith, a say in the way things were run and various other privileges.

==Invasions==
Starting around the early 700s, the relatively new Umayyad Caliphate had begun conquering Europe, seizing nearly all of Spain. While the other Mediterranean European countries were under the protection of the Byzantine Empire, the South of France was vulnerable and became the site of significant clashes between the local Frankish tribes and the invading Muslims. During this time period, Frankish statesman Charles Martel was able to rally the Franks at the battle of Tours and beat back the invasion; his grandson Charlemagne would succeed in uniting the remainder of Western Europe under the Carolingian Empire, the closest the West had ever been to a unified state since Rome. While the Empire didn't last, it laid the groundwork for the two future states of France and the Holy Roman Empire.

Around 793 the [[Viking]]s began to show up and would remain an active element for centuries to come. While most of these attacks were short yet violent raids for the sake of pillaging and taking slaves, eventually the Vikings conquered a sizable chunk of England and established the "Danelaw," ensuring a long-term presence that would last even after the English petty kingdoms ousted the Norse warlords. France faired somewhat better, as the French monarch was able to convince the invading vikings to settle down and own the province of Normandy in exchange for their fealty. This would have long-term consequences as said Normans ended up claiming the English crown for themselves, leading William the Conqueror to invade England in 1066 and claim it for himself; this typically marks the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of the High Middle Ages, as the various European powers were finally starting to stabilize and more formal governance was being made. It's also the point where the iconic heavily cavalry in full armor became a thing, as stirrup made cavalry considerably more practical, while mail armor began to encompass more of the body than the mere "chain shirt" that had existed since Roman times.

==Notes==
* This is a western European thing. Byzantium, [[China]], [[India]], Persia and eventually the Islamic Caliphates were, on the whole, doing quite well at this time. After all, this was the era that played host to the meteoric rise of Islam as both a world religion and temporal superpower. In Europe, Byzantine Empire had it quite well under Justinian that strove to restore the old Empire, financing and patronising religious, cultural and scientific advancement of the state. It is under his rule that famous Hagia Sophia was constructed. However, most influential and lasting legacy of his was the unified and complex Codex of Laws, known as Corpus Iuris Civilis, that combined both older Roman Laws and Justinian's own innovations. While it would be lost and abandoned by the West after the Great Schism, it was revisited by Napoleon, who used it as the basis for the Napoleonic code of which modern day Laws are delivered from. Justinian was doing great until up to half of the entire population died in the plague outbreak named after him and Theodora's death by cancer pretty much broke the last great classical autocrat. After Byzantium and Persia broke each other, the Islamic empire came and sent them to their inevitable declines. The Caliphate though would go through a Golden Age that lasted until the Mongols, excepting the Sunni-Shia schism and the Abbasids overthrowing the Umayyads. There is also an often overlooked period called the Carolingian Renaissance which occurred from the 8th-9th century and saw flourishing in frankish intellectual elites in such areas as law, writing, literature, liturgical reforms and arts. China would emerge from a period of political instability (and China had a lot of that) be reunified by the Sui Dynasty and thrive under the Tang Dynasty, notably developing the Imperial Bureaucracy based on competitive examination. Meanwhile, Japan was coming into its own as a well-developed civilization with the Nara and Heian Periods following China's model.
* Long story short term "Dark Age" has become rather contentious in recent decades among historians and at the very least it has been judged that people from the Renaissance onward overestimated in how severe the fall was. Many prefer the far less loaded '''Early Medieval Period''' to describe this period of history.
* The real reason we call this period the “Dark Age” is due to the relative lack of European writings we have in comparison to the ages coming before and after. Between the high political instability and drop in literacy, the only people making books at this time were monks. That’s not to say Europe was a total intellectual vacuum; the University was invented in this time period, and would build a network of schools that would really come into prominence once the Renaissance hits.
* There are other periods of time labeled "Dark Ages" such as the Greek Dark Ages between the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the [[Classical Period]]. Basically whenever an advanced civilization regresses a decent bit due to general decline or some catastrophe. And like the previous point, we know almost nothing about what happened during these periods, especially so for the Bronze Age.

==The appeal of the Dark Age==
How do you like your medieval fantasy? Do you like it to be harsher, grittier and on the cruder side? Then the Dark Ages are a good place to mine for ideas. People in shattered isolated settlements where buildings are rough while a king theoretically reigns but the power lies in the hands of local nobles and knights. Viking raiders on longships searching for gold and thralls raiding who do battle with scruffy knights in dirty scale and mail who are at best but marginally more civilized than the pagan "barbarians" with whom they do battle. Both of which are more likely to preserve their deeds in song than with words written down in books. Isolated monasteries of monks copying down a few ancient texts that they can not read for future generations. You can even work in a bit of a post apocalyptic vibe with a Dark Age setting, where people build crude wooden fortresses and barn like halls exist alongside the remains of more impressive structures of stone from a now fallen empire. Civilization once stood here and it might do so again, but now is an age of turmoil and the sword.

Not to say that these guys did not have a creative side, this period is tied in with celtic spiral patterns and tapistries. In general the aesthetics of the time are more abstract than the classical era before it or the high middle ages and renaissance ahead of it.

==Dark inspired Games, Factions and Settings==
This is one of the most used settings in all fantasy. While usually taking a fair degree of artistic liberties, most fantasy authors use the aesthetics of feudalism in one way or another: poor peasants, luxurious (for the time) and corrupt nobility courts stabbing each other in the back, dirty and decrepit cities, barbarians pillaging the remnants of the old empires, a nebulous fight in the frontiers (usually based of the muslim or mongol invasions during the Middle Ages)... The Kingdom of Bretonnia in Warhammer FB is clearly inspired in a late version of the Middle Ages' Kingdom of France and/or England, whereas the Empire is closer to Early Modern Age's Holy Roman Empire. The human kingdoms in The Lord of The Rings also follow a similar aesthetic, although much less grounded in reality and more in fantasy.

{{Skub}}
{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

High Middle Ages

2022-04-08T21:18:04Z

2607:FB90:6CC9:4561:4142:C3A:928E:CE94: /* Notes */

[[File:Salisbury cathedral.jpg|300px|thumb|left|Salisbury Cathedral built in the 1200s with a 100 meter tall spire, not the work of illiterate dung farmers]]
{{Topquote|War of the roses, Chaucer's tales. 
The brutal feudal system. 
Holy crusades, Bubonic plague. 
Can't say that we've really missed 'em. 
So dark and barbaric, so dull and mundane. 
That was so Middle Ages. 
That was so... Charlemagne.|[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggrk3Z7lqYY Something Rotten!]]}}

Around the year 1000 the people in Western Europe began to get their shit together and moved out of the [[Dark Age]]s, and the 1066 three-way war involving Norwegian and Norman invasions over Britain ending in Norman victory and the coronation of William the Conqueror is generally held as the point where the Dark Age/Early Medieval Period ended. The economy steadily improve and cities began to grow again. Though no single state had risen to unify Europe since the Carolingian Empire, individual kingdoms had risen to replace the old tribal confederations (though feudalism was still the rule of the day), allowing for a degree of political stability, and with it, trade networks grew. Skills were honed, new technologies were acquired. Some of these were brought in from the east such as gunpowder, giant hamster wheel powered cranes and paper but others were developed locally such as stained glass and an increasingly wide use of water power. Gothic architecture emerged as Cathedrals reached to the sky. While Slavery was gradually abandoned in much of Europe, trade in the Mediterranean became more and more profitable, especially to the benefit of the Arab Slave Trade. The Byzantine–Seljuq wars also happened at this time, which influenced a much more famous later event, The Crusades.

Unfortunately the good times did not last as the 14th century was a bit of a doozy. First there was famine, which is never a nice thing. Then in 1346 there was the Black Death which wiped out about a third of the people in Europe with some areas getting hit worse than others. Ironically improvements in trade and the growth of cities with little consideration to public heath made such a die off possible. Small isolated villages hit by plague might be wiped out before it can spread, leaving a ghost town and spooked but healthy neighbors. Cities with tens of thousands of people full of filth (human waste, animal waste, food scraps, blood from slaughtered animals, dead stray dogs, dead rats which feed on this stuff and other such grodiness) in which carts, barges and ships are always coming and going can go on for some time propagating the plague like a [[Nurgle]] Machine. However, the tradeoff was that peasants, being in lower supply, were now more valuable and could now earn wages to lift themselves out of serfdom and earn some (very basic) rights. Medicine also advanced as healers were forced to change their means and methods and had plenty of sick people to practice and try new things on and primitive superstition on that count slowly began to give way out of simple necessity.

In Japan the Heian era ended in 1185 with the rise of the Kamakura shogunate. Except for the short lived (3 years) [[Wikipedia:Kenmu Restoration|Kenmu Restoration]], the Emperor would be a powerless figurehead for almost 700 years until the Meiji revolution of 1868. This is also the era the [[Samurai]] class emerged. The [[Katana]] would only appear at the very end of this period with the true form only emerging around 1400. Samurai wore the longer ''tachi'' instead.

==High Middle Age Around Europe==
The toll from the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the later fall of the Carolingian Empire, plus the raiding campaigns of Vikings, Magyars, and Muslims, left the continent in a weakened state. However, by the time the 11th century started, the feudal economic system was in full effect, and the "relative" (keyword being "relative") moment of peace allowed the cities and kingdoms to begin a process of recovery. Trade and commerce began picking up steam once again, making cities important financial and political points of interests. Likewise, the different monarchies and ruling nobles began a very slow process of recovering their power. The idea of the ''primus inter pares'' (first among equals) was fine and good, but it meant that the kings had little more power (and on many occasions, less effective power) than the nobles they supposedly ruled over. This consolidation of power in the hands of national monarchies was a long, loooong process that only started coming into fruition at the very end of the period. In the meantime, though, there were many processes of cultural renovation with the birth of the Romanesque and Gothic styles, and even more deep changes with the Gregorian reformation, the start of the mendicant orders and the spread of the first universities.

Different areas of Europe evolved in different ways, though. In the Iberian Peninsula, this period included most of the second half of the wars of the ''Reconquista''. The fall of the Caliphate of Cordoba in favour of the Taifas system (basically a fragmentation of power in little independent Muslim kingdoms) was the signal for the Christian kingdoms of the north to kick the reconquest of the south into overdrive. This doesn't mean this was an unified campaign, though. As was usual for medieval kingdoms, backstabbings and general infighting on both sides was abound, but the weakened Muslim kingdoms slowly but surely lost ground, despite briefly unifying themselves under the Almoravids and Almohads. The last Muslim kingdom, the Kingdom of Granada, was conquered in 1492 by the Catholic Kings. Meanwhile, the Christian kingdoms started their unification process, which would culminate in the marriage of Elisabeth of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, setting up the basis for the unification of Spain. Meanwhile, Portugal started a campaign of exploration through the Atlantic, which would later be followed by Castile, birthing a competition for the exploration and discovery for route trades to India (and later the Americas) between the two.

In the region that was once the Carolingian Empire, the Kingdom of France slowly but surely started gaining territories against the other two members of the Treaty of Verdun, and its ruling dynasties managed to slowly build up the power that had been lost centuries ago. Of particular importance was the Normand conquest of England by the Duke of Normandy. William the Bastard (which became the Conqueror after his victory) managed to pull off a successful invasion of England by taking advantage of a dynastic dispute. This generated quite a dilemma for the time: though William was still the Duke of Normandy and nominally a vassal of the French king, in practice he had as much (if not more) power and influence than his lord, which put both of them on a very tense position. The French kings tried to reduce the English monarchs' influence in France by limiting the boundaries of their continental possessions, which kept increasing the tensions between the two kingdoms. This situation finally came to a close with the death of the last Capetian without a clear heir to the throne. With no clear ruler and with the English kings having no little dynastic claims to the French throne, he declared war to reclaim the crown against the House of Valois, the other noble family fighting for the French throne. And thus began the Hundred Years War, which, as it name implies, was [[Long War|fucking long]]. This clusterfuck of a war (both a massive international conflict, a civil war and a bloody family feud) eventually involved pretty much all active players in Western Europe at one point or another, and, alongside [[Nurgle|the Black Death and the massive famines]] that coincided with it, caused a lot of death and destruction. The war kept going on and on until the eventual French victory, managing to drive the English to the other side of the English Channel and starting a rivalry between the two nations that would last for centuries. After this defeat, England immediately became embroiled in another civil war, the War of the Roses.

Speaking of England, they went through a lot of upheaval while bickering with France. The new Norman rule had to deal with the nearby kingdoms and a lot of political instability, and then the last heir of the House of Normandy died, which started a civil war which ended with the Plantagenet as the kings of England. During the rule of the famous Richard the Lionheart, that instability continues, especially when the king goes to the Crusades instead of actually taking care of home affairs. His brother John took control of the country after Richard was kidnapped, a move which not only pissed many people off (John was seen as an usurper already, though many historians nowadays see this bad image as the result of his political enemies' propaganda), it gave his rivals the perfect excuse to the disgruntled nobles to rebel against him. John was forced to sign the ''Magna Carta'', a legal document which guaranteed a lot of rights and freedoms to nobility at the expense of the crown. This document is often considered as one of the most important political reforms in history, since it paved the way for modern parliamentarian systems (even though the original document was never put into practice, only a heavily modified version was eventually applied after many political shenanigans).

On the Italian Peninsula, the fragmentation caused by the fall of the Roman Empire and the infighting between the different factions was the catalyst for the birth of most of the Italian city-states. With the Normand conquest of the Catepanate of Italy (basically a province of the Byzantine Empire in Southern Italy), the biggest political power on Italy became the Papacy by far, since the young city-states simply couldn't compete with the Catholic Church in political, spiritual and financial power at the time. The Church's power was not uncontested, though. On the one hand, pushing for the Crusades had given the Pope quite a lot of authority and prestige all over Christianity, but on the other hand, the concentration of power in the hands of nobility and the national monarchies meant that their earthly powers were questioned by secular authorities. In particular, the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire clashed frequently in this matters, since both papal and imperial powers claimed to represent the will of God in some form, though the dispute centers around their influence on the "''dominium mundi''", and more specifically, the temporal powers. The Investiture Controversy was but the first of the many clashes between this two authorities which would continue all throughout the rest of the Middle Ages.

Speaking of the [[The Empire (Warhammer Fantasy)|Holy Roman Empire]] ([[meme|which was neither holy, nor Roman, nor technically an empire]]), it was the technical successor of the imperial authority. Also, it was '''''big''''', the biggest Christian kingdom by far during the High Middle Ages (the Byzantine Empire had lost quite a lot of ground, and would continue to do so during the period). However, despite its size, population and political influence all around it, it was mostly a confederation of German kingdoms and principalities, all with their own rules and customs. The only real cohesive element was the figure of the Emperor, and the struggles to get that power were frequent. Thus, it was unable to consolidate its power into a centralized monarchy like France, England or Spain, though it was still the great Christian power of this period, and would continue to be a powerhouse in the following centuries.

In the northern parts of Europe, the Scandinavian kingdoms undertook a heavy process of Christianization. After raiding the southern lands for a couple of centuries, many realized that the feudal organization was actually more beneficial than just straight piracy in the long run (although viking raids took a long while to disappear altogether), so they adopted Christianity. This process was accompanied by the adoption of modern political systems and customs, which would pave the way for the Viking and German chieftains to actually create proper medieval kingdoms. In particular, the new kingdoms focused on sea trade, since they already had a lot of naval know-how, and agriculture in Scandinavia was a difficult proposition anyway. In particular, they clashed with the Hanseatic League, a group of principalities and other minor states allied in a merchant confederation which tried to monopolize the regional trade. To counter this, the kingdoms of Sweden, Norway and Denmark created the Kalmar Union, with the Queen Margaret I of Denmark ruling over all three kingdoms at once. However, this union didn't translate into the creation of an unified state, dissolving at the beginning of the Early Modern Ages.

In the other side of Christendom, the Eastern Roman Empire (or the Byzantine Empire for short) was not in the best shape. It had received a massive mauling during the previous centuries due to the wars against the Persians first and later the sudden apparition of Islam, which took away most of its territories in Northern Africa and the Middle East. It was the fast advance of the Seljuk Turks over Anatolia which forced the Roman Emperor to ask for help to anyone that he could find (and considering they had broken with the Roman Church very recently, it was interpreted as a massive sign of weakness everywhere), which led directly to the Crusades. While the Crusades helped the Byzantines stabilize their eastern borders by funding the Crusader kingdoms, Byzantine territories like Bulgaria managed to gain independence. And then the Fourth Crusade happened, [[fail|which instead of going to the Holy Land to fight the infidels, it ended up besieging and raiding Constantinople itself to pay off some Venetian loan sharks]]. By the time the Byzantine emperors could retake the capital, they'd lost most of their territories elsewhere, which left the Eastern Roman Empire as a vestigial state whose only advantage was its geographically advantageous position. Still, by 1453 the Ottomans managed to finally capture the remains of the empire (which was basically just Constantinople by this point), signaling the end of whatever was left of the Roman Empire of old.

In Central and Eastern Europe, the last big processes of Christianization took place, from Bohemia to Lithuania to the Rus Kingdoms. This allowed a lot of expansion and modernization of this new kingdoms. And then the [[Mongols]] arrived. The arrival of the Mongols to Eastern and Central Europe signals a massive power shift in the area, since the Mongols managed to defeat and conquer many of the European kingdoms. The European tactics that favoured heavy cavalry were catastrophically outmaneuvered against the light archer cavalry of the Mongols, especially in the great open plains of central and eastern Europe. Bohemia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Lithuania were badly hit by this assault, and the Rus Kingdoms were outright conquered and annexed to the Mongol sphere of influence. The death of the Mongol leaders stopped the invasions from going further. Mongol influence was only shaken off from this area after a long process of fighting by the early Russian czars. After the Mongol khanates were pretty much defeated, the main concern of the kingdoms from Eastern Europe became the Ottoman Empire, since the Turks had managed to advance upon the territories from the former Byzantine Empire, which would mark the history of the region with constant clashes during the Early Modern Age. Also, during all of this, this area was squarely hit by the Black Plague in the 14th Century, just as the rest of Europe was. But unlike the western kingdoms, where peasants manage to wrestle some limited concessions to the nobles due to the fact there were becoming pretty scarce, the exact opposite happened here. Many Russian nobles manage to reinforce their authority over their peasant population, in which some historians know as the "second serfdom", which would strengthen the nobility's grasp over the peasants. This system was so strong that it would survive for over 500 years and would only finally be abolished for good in the Russian Revolution in 1917... only for the Communists and Putin's Russia to continue it in far less obvious ways to the present day.

==Islamic Golden Age==
The Islamic Golden age is a period that occurred during the Abbasid Caliphate between 750 and 1258. As you can expect the Muslim world was doing very well during this period, the Abbassid Caliphate during the reign of Harun-Al-Rashid was the largest and most powerful polity in the world. Meanwhile, in the realm of the sciences, the Muslims were making use of a lot of the classical knowledge they had seized and expanded on it. During this time the Islamic World saw major advancing in terms of science (Primitive Chemistry from Alchemical traditions in particular), medicine, mathematics <s>(there's a reason why they call them Arabic Numerals)</s> (the reason is that they were introduced to Europe through Arabs, though the numbers themselves originate from India), technology (optics, ceramics, architecture, windmills), art (a lot of Islamic Art relies on geometric patterns given the religion's taboo about images due to fear of idolatry, so having trigonometry was a big boon here) and trade. At the heart of it was Baghdad being a center of learning and a large thriving urban center. Yet not far behind were cities like Samarkand, Damascus, and Cordoba. Unfortunately, the Crusades and the [[Genghis motherfucking Khan|Mongols]] put a stop to it and trashed up a lot of the Middle East. However, the spirit of this era, of scientific advancement and glorious conquest, would live on past the fall of Baghdad, in places like Mughal India, and the Emirate/Caliphate of Cordoba in Spain.

==Khmer Golden Age==
While Europe wallowed in the grimdark middle ages, half a world away in what is now Cambodia the city of Angkor was busily becoming a (short lived) paradise on Earth. The Khmer were Hindu at the time and Angkor was constructed as a massive temple and urban area encompassing over a thousand square kilometers, complete with canals and two hand-dug reservoirs that are [https://www.google.com/maps/@13.434607,103.8607491,31561m/data=!3m1!1e3 easily visible from space] and capable of holding a hundred million cubic meters of water. The entire complex is larger than New York City and at its height may have had over a million residents. The good times ended when they went full Buddhism.

== Notes ==

* This is the high points of chivalry, when an Armored Knight on Horseback had been refined into a truly devastating force. Battles were generally won or lost by the strength of the Heavy Cavalry that one side could bring to bear.
* This is the golden age of castles. Any lord of any significance would put together a stone castle to consolidate his position and the design of castles advanced from simple mottes and Bailies to what most people would think of when they heard the word castle. They were also very resilient, not only to bombardment by siege engines or attempts to storm them, but had graneries and water supplies to weather sieges of at least Months and often Years.
* Warfare in this age was mostly a matter of fairly small parties of knights (maybe 100) raiding villages and merchants in the other guys territory and besieging castles. Large armies clashing with each other out on the open did happen, but was the exception rather than the rule. That said, Warfare was fairly constant during this period. There were always some squabbling city states, obstinate lordlings making a fuss, succession interregnums with rival heirs, blood feuds or clash between a couple of the bigger kingdoms happening somewhere in Europe, as well as a lot of banditry.
* [[Cannon]]s and [[Firearm]]s begin to show up in Europe around the late 13th century, though both were crude affairs largely of marginal use compared with more traditional muscle powered weaponry.
* While hardly a unique feature to this period or Europe people at this point thought in terms of ''Knowing Their Place''. In medieval society what role you had was largely determined by birth. Some people did the telling and the rest did what they were told. Medieval peasants by in large did not care much about government policy unless it directly and overtly effected them. It was not their business, there were other people out there which knew better than them which should know what to do and that their judgement had god's backing. This is not an absolute mentality, they did have an idea that there were obligations that nobles needed to fulfill to their subjects and if they were pushed or abused too much they would riot, but it is a major distinction that people should consider when trying to get into the mind of a medieval peasant or lord.
* The portrayal of this time period as having dour, muted colors is completely inaccurate. Dying was a rich industry and while natural dyes had a relatively limited color range (red, blue, yellow, brown, indigo, green, pink, and orange were all common) it was abundant and middle class or higher non-clothing items were generally decorated (clothes were restricted to, at most, simple patterns as the methods of washing clothes weren't delicates friendly). A large portion of this perception comes from period art, where colors have faded and centuries of grime (which can't be removed without harming the work) has accumulated. This actually applies to many periods of history, but the middle ages are most the frequently victimized of it.

== The appeal of the High Middle Ages ==
How do you like your medieval fantasy? Do you like it more refined and heroic? With beautiful Gothic cathedrals with stained glass windows and mighty castles of stone with fluttering banners full of fat friars and proud knights. Or scholarly Sultans and zealous Hashashin more your type of deal? Well this period is for you. Not that it was all lolipops and sunshine. The nobles were still playing their Games of Thrones in dynastic squabbles plus there were the Crusades, Islamic marauders, and endless Feudal wars. The fact that its the point where gunpowder just barely coming also helps it as the standard point of development where [[Medieval Stasis]] work takes place. Being a serf or a Jew in the path of these armies at this time sucked. The mix of [[Bretonnia|Medieval Splendor and Brutality]] makes for a nice contrast.

This period also gave us some heroes such as Robin Hood. And though King Arthur has his roots in the Dark Age when the native British were fighting against the invading Saxons, his popularity massively took off thanks to Norman literature and adapted by countless countries across Europe.

== High Middle Age inspired Games, Factions and Settings ==
*[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

BattleTech

2022-04-08T19:07:52Z

2607:FB90:6CC9:4561:4142:C3A:928E:CE94: /* Battletech 2018 */

{{awesome}}
[[Image:NEW-BT-LOGOFLAT.png|NEW-BT-LOGOFLAT.png|center]]
{{Game Infobox
|name = BattleTech
|picture = [[Image:NEW-BT-LOGOFLAT.png|200px]]
|type = [[Wargame]]
|publisher = [[Catalyst Game Labs]]
|playno = Billions
|year = 1984
|books = Total Warfare or The BattleMech Manual
}}
{{topquote|It is the 31st century, a time of endless wars that rage across human-occupied space. As star empires clash, these epic wars are won and lost by BattleMechs, 23-56 foot tall humanoid metal titans bristling with lasers, autocannons and dozens of other lethal weapons; enough firepower to level entire city blocks. Your elite force of MechWarriors drives these juggernauts into battle, proudly holding your faction's flag high, intent on expanding the power and glory of your realm. At their beck and call are the support units of armored vehicles, power armored infantry, aerospace fighters and more, wielded by a MechWarrior's skillful command to aid him in ultimate victory. Will they become legends, or forgotten casualties? Only your skill and luck will determine their fate!|Product promotional tagline}}

'''BattleTech''', or '''MechWarrior''' as most of the non-neckbearded populace know it, is a tabletop wargame about armies of giant robots fighting one another for honor, money, and territory in a far-distant feudal future. Think [[Star Wars]] AT-STs, or [[Warhammer 40,000]]'s [[Imperial Knight|Imperial Knights]] (Games Workshop decided they liked Battlemechs too). It’s also perhaps the most realistic example of walker warfare. Using their size to mount sufficient energy generation and armor that they are fast enough, maneuverable enough, and armored enough that being a bullet magnet does not matter. Using their vertical build to mount numerous huge weapons that each would take up all the space on most tanks modern militaries would consider super-heavy. Usually operating in combined arms warfare and supported by tanks, hovercraft, aircraft, and infantry. Not sinking into the ground like its quicksand because dirt reaches maximum compression very quickly (and thus all anti-mech arguments are rendered invalid by combined arms, armor, power-plant, firepower, and actual science), and so on. The realism of the technology (if not the moronic House Lords and nonsensical events) is so great it could be a glimpse into the future. Y’know, before Bolos come along and replace everything.

This article is mostly concerned with the fluff and story of Battletech. If you're looking for a guide to getting into the game in the first place, check out [[Starting Battletech]].

==Holy Crap, Giant Robots Are Awesome==
[[Image:Batdroid.jpg|thumb|right|''Battledroids'', the first edition of the game, c. 1984. A ''literally''-textbook example on how to get sued nine different ways from Sunday.]]
In the early 1980s, [[Jordan Weisman]] was [[Weeaboo|fascinated]] by several Japanese [[anime]] involving giant robots, or "[[mecha]]." He was quoted as saying that he liked the designs and idea of giant robots fighting on the battlefield, but did not have a taste for the storylines that the Japanese wrote about them. In 1984, Weisman founded [[FASA]] and acquired the licenses to designs from several series, the most famous being ''Super Dimension Fortress Macross,'' though the largest portion came from ''Fang of the Sun Dougram'' and combined them to make Battletech.

The first edition of this game, called ''Battledroids'', was a hex-based boardgame played on a battlefield illustrated with various types of terrain. It came with two large plastic minis of featured mechs, imported from Japan. Initially, sales were mediocre as the sheer size of the mechs made them awkward in gameplay. Soon after the launch of ''Battledroids'' Lucasfilm filed a lawsuit against FASA for using the name "droids," which they had trademarked in 1978. Discretion being the better part of valor, FASA changed the name of the game to Battlemech in time for the second edition printing in 1986. This time, cardboard stand-ins replaced the plastic miniatures, and a tradition was born. To this day, Battletech can be played without purchasing any physical models and with any proxy you please.

Following the release of the second edition, fans of the game clamored for new miniatures. FASA obliged, rescaling their mechs for more convenient play and designing a host of in-house mechs to broaden variety and bridge the gap between the sleek Macross and crude Dougram designs. New models notwithstanding, the third edition, dubbed ''Battletech,'' was shipped with solely Macross- and Dougram-based minis. However, in 1995 [[That Guy|Harmony]] [[Rage|Gold]], an American localization company which had licensed the international distribution and toy rights to SDF Macross, issued a C&D against FASA for the use of all mecha designs from the Macross franchise. FASA ceased production of these miniatures, which were among the most popular designs in the franchise, and published a fourth edition of the game in 1996 again featuring cardboard tokens, which were all based on their own original mechs.

Before '''''Battletech''''', the mecha genre was seen as something that belonged mostly to the Japanese. With few exceptions (''Power Rangers'' and ''Star Wars'', and even then the Mechs from the former were reused footage from Japanese shows), the genre was almost entirely made up of anime productions imported from Japan. Battletech pioneered a new approach to mecha within the Western fandom, featuring mostly stories of pseudo-realistic wars fought by real soldiers rather than teenagers taking on forces of evil or single-handedly winning interplanetary wars, plots that dominated the few mecha series that were subbed by the dedicated VHS fansubbers of the day. More importantly, the physical limitations of the Battlemechs, unlike the limitations of tanks in, say, [[Warhammer 40,000]], are critical to the planning and strategy of outfitting mechs and using them on the tabletop.

===The Mechs===
{{topquote|"Shoot for his cockpit! [[Iron Hands|Kill the meat]], [[Adeptus Mechanicus|save the metal.]]"|Sergeant Robert "Deadeye" Unther (Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries - Training Tutorial)}}
BattleTech mechs function and are utilized more like tanks with legs than the super-agile flying mecha common in Japanese depictions. Mechs are deployed in formations of four or five, called lances in the Inner Sphere and stars in the Clans. They are able to operate in space, on planets with caustic atmospheres, underwater, and in a wide range of temperatures that would be lethal to unprotected humans. One of the biggest upsides of mechs as combat vehicles is their extreme efficiency-of-arms: an effectively limitless amount of time without requiring fuel due to their fusion reactors alongside hyper-efficient Myomer 'muscles' inside the Battlemech’s limbs that can carry more weapons and armor per-ton than any other combat platform in existence. The only things stopping a mech from being able to fight forever are ammunition, repairs, and allowing the pilot to rest. Even when a mech is destroyed, losing the pilot is a relatively rare occurrence thanks to very effective ejection systems. A destroyed mech chassis can also be salvaged and rebuilt to fight another day, good as new. In the early 3000s setting this means many mechs are often decades or even hundreds of years old, Ship of Theseus-style. Some mechs even have unique identities and/or affiliations with certain royal Houses or mercenary families. Also, as stated in the quote above, it's not uncommon for cash-strapped mercenaries, pirates, or even planetary militia to prioritize aiming for the cockpit and/or forcing Mechwarriors to eject from overheating/battle damage in order to claim the surviving Battlemech wreckage for salvage or as a spoil of war.

As far as locomotion styles, bipedal mechs are the most common, with the weapon systems mounted either in the torso compartments or on the arms. Quadrupedal mechs do exist but are relatively rare, they are slower than bipedal mechs and don't offer the same amount of weapon space for a given weight class and more legs (and more everything else) on a mech means, of course, greater expenses. Even rarer are tripod mechs, generally restricted to experimental super-heavy designs. Bipedal mechs can also grasp things in their hands (if they have them) like melee weapons or pesky tanks. Early versions of BattleTech feature mechs that could transform into fighter planes, but these were dropped relatively quickly in its life cycle due to copyright problems.

The main downside of mechs is their inability to efficiently manage heat buildup. Heat is generated by the fusion reactor, the environment, movement, and mostly as a result of firing weapons. Mechs mount multiple gigantic one-ton heatsink units to deal with this buildup, but it is a constant problem for pilots to manage. Mechs that feature a lot of energy-based weapons will generate especially high levels of heat, and therefore manage very poorly in extremely hot environments. Firing all the weapons of certain mech variants at once (the ''Nova'' mech is most infamous) can cause it to overheat to such an extent that the reactor core melts down before the heatsinks can shunt the heat out of the chassis, which is bad. Safety measures that shut down the entire mech when it reaches a certain temperature threshold are always installed, but since this usually happens in a combat situation, and thus leaves the mech defenseless, some pilots will intentionally disable the safeguards to take their chances. Depending on the technology level of a given game, more efficient heatsinks can be assigned to mechs that remove heat more quickly and allow hotter builds. The fluff also mentions some experimental heatsinks that changed the heat energy to light (<strike>???</strike>Actually plausible, we have been experimenting with this concept irl) but had the downside of making the mech look like a walking rave, as well as heatsinks that utilized caustic liquids to move heat faster but with a limited lifespan.

Weapons consist of three general categories: ballistic, energy, and missile. Each has its own strengths and weakness: ballistic weapons weigh more, require ammo, but do not generate much heat, energy weapons are the opposite, and missiles generate some heat/consume ammo but can be indirectly fired with targeting data from scouts. Outfitting a mech for the proper engagement is key to obtaining victory: mechs outfitted for mech-to-mech combat will generally mount only high-damage weapons with lower ammo counts and slower rates of fire, while mechs set for vehicle and infantry combat will mount weapons that fire quickly but do lower damage per shot. Likewise, mechs that do not expect steady resupply will mount more energy weapons so they are not beholden to ammo counts.

Mechs range between 20 to 100 tons in four weight classes, though a few experimental units lie outside these ranges. The weight classes are light (20-35), medium (40-55), heavy (60-75), and assault (80-100). Considering their size (23-56 feet), that's pretty light; the Maus (33 feet long and 11 feet high) mega-tank that Adolf Hitler demanded weighed 188 tons. (One possible explanation here is that the "tonnage" in a weight class isn't the weight of the mech, but rather the weight available to mount things on the chassis. So an Atlas assault mech has 100 tons of available space for reactor, life support, weapons, armor etc, explaining why various sub-types of a mech drop something and replace it with something else of equal weight. A Flea light mech has 20 tons). Rarer still are super heavy mechs (with weights between 110 to 200 tons). While they are walking fortresses that put even Assault Mechs to shame, they tend to be ridiculously expensive, extremely slow, have issues with supporting that weight, are vulnerable to attacks from swarms of smaller enemies like tanks, and have difficulty installing reactors with sufficient power. Top sustainable speeds of mechs vary from 32.4 kph (20 mph) for the assault ''Annihilator'' to 162 kph (101 mph) for the light ''Firemoth'' scout. Keep in mind that the American M1A1 Abrams tank has a top speed of 72 kph (45 mph) on a paved road and much less crossing difficult terrain. Mechs can also be mounted with rechargeable jump jets that give them the ability to hop across the battlefield or up/down terrain. According to varying fluff depictions, mechs are even able to climb up/down cliff walls and perform flying dropkicks to enemy cockpits, which is awesome.

Depending on where in the timeline the specific game takes place (this is a player choice), there will be two possible classes of mechs: [[BattleMech]]s and [[OmniMech]]s. Battlemechs are the older style, with a set number of variants that cannot be changed in the field. This style was universal in the Inner Sphere before the arrival of the Clans. Omnimechs, a Clan invention, feature a modular construction style and a snap-on software integration which gives them the freedom of changing loadouts quickly. For example, a ''Dragon'' Battlemech comes in a default configuration consisting of one LRM-10, one Autocannon/5, and two medium lasers. The 1C variant replaces the Autocannon/5 with an Autocannon/2 and more armor, while the 5N upgrades the Autocannon/5 to an Ultra Autocannon/5. A pilot must use one of these variants and is incapable of changing the loadout without serious hours-long reworking of the mech's internals in a Mech maintenance facility. Conversely, a ''Mad Dog'' Omnimech comes with a default configuration of two LRM-20s, two medium pulse lasers, and two large pulse lasers. A pilot is able to modify this loadout as they see fit within less than an hour with a technical team, say dropping the two medium pulse lasers for more missile ammo/armor or changing the LRMs to SRMs for short-range engagements.

Like most Western sci-fi series, Battlemechs are somewhat inspired by real theoretical technologies; their weapons range from machine guns (albeit very big ones) and missiles, to coilguns and particle accelerators. The biggest leaps from reality (aside from FTL travel and communications) are the fusion reactor, (a technology still only theoretically possible,) the neurohelmet, (which interfaces with the pilot's brain and keeps the mech upright based on the pilot's own sense of balance,) and the massive muscle-like Myomer fibers that actually allow the mech to move upon being exposed to electrical current.

While Battlemechs dominate the battlefields of Battletech, armored vehicles still have a place. Most of the time, tanks, hovercraft, and APCs are used where mechs would be too expensive (or too advanced) to maintain, or in roles where a mech would be ineffective. This means that, in addition to Battlemechs, one can find infantry, vehicles, aerial vehicles, naval vehicles, and spaceships. It is worth noting that vehicles can be a real threat to Battlemechs in great enough numbers, since they mount the same weapons as mechs. Some tanks can also push the 100-ton limit and sport the gigantic weaponry usually mounted on an Assault mech chassis. In other words, where mechs are [[Space Marines]], the vehicles are more akin to [[Eldar]] Aspects.

Mechs in BattleTech fiction also have a curious tendency to go up in a mini nuclear explosion when their reactor core is breached by weapon fire. Mushroom clouds, explosions, heat, radiation, the whole bit. This has been nicknamed "stackpoling" after BattleTech novel author Michael Stackpole, who includes at least one of these events in each novel he writes. If the reactor was actually breached, what should happen is a meltdown of the reactor (and probably some chunks of the surrounding mech) that quickly burns out because the reactor can't maintain the fusion reaction without proper containment. Reactors are generally incapable of generating an actual nuclear explosion: real-world reactor "explosions" are usually a result of the coolant flash-overheating and generating a pressure-based steam explosion that destroys the reactor building. Lingering radiation would still be a problem of course, but that is usually handwaved away in BattleTech fluff or not mentioned at all.

To get into the actual science of this, a hypothetical fusion reactor wouldn't produce that many radioactive substances. And what few they do would be relatively short lived and would be weak beta emitters. The most likely substance would be Tritium, which is where the stereotypical glow in the dark green radiation comes from. The Mech would glow in the dark but a decent decontamination process would render it mostly harmless. In other words, the stories are right for the wrong reasons.

More on actual science. A containment breach would produce a pretty big explosion. The reactor (assuming H+H fusion, which seems reasonable since we never hear anything about deuterium or H3 mining) would be operating at something close to 15,000,000K temperature and 250,000,000,000 atmospheres of pressure to induce fusion. Assuming there's a couple of cubic meters of gas being contained at those pressures by magnetic fields and surrounded by a few more cubic meters of vacuum, a sudden and catastrophic loss of containment would almost certainly cause an explosion that would cause a mushroom cloud and be easy to mistake for a small nuclear weapon.

==Warfare in the Thirty-first Century==

When somebody decides to attack another world, they load up their 'Mechs (and tanks, and infantry, etc...) onto massive shuttles called DropShips. These boost off into space and link up with Jumpships, semi-mobile Space-Fold drives sitting a ways out into the star's system (due to the limits of BattleTech FTL, Jumpships can't get any closer to a system's star than a radius roughly around the orbit of Saturn in the Sol System. For simplicity's sake, most Jumpships move to the zenith or nadir points directly "above" or "below" the star's orbital plane). The Dropships latch onto the Jumpships, which make a series of jumps from star to star until they reach the target system.

Compared to some sci-fi franchises such as Star Wars or Star Trek, aerospace combat between ships isn’t really that common for several reasons. For one, KF Drive used to propel Jumpships (all of which can’t land on a planet) makes up 95% of its mass and leaves little room for anything else besides Dropship docking ports, basic ship equipment, crew quarters, and the Jumpsail used for recharging the drive. And while Warships do exist with drives half the size as their civilian models, the drives alone are more than five times more expensive to build and are prioritized for only strategically vital missions like real-life Dreadnoughts. In that regard, Battletech’ Jumpships are closer to Dune’s massive but ungainly Heighliners than Star War’s Star Destroyers. As a result, most aerospace combat is dominated by armed Dropships or aerospace fighters. Orbital bombardments and naval blockades are a thing but not typically used frequently due to how much firepower is required for a planetary scale.

Once they reach the target, the Dropships detach from the Jumpships and burn deeper into the system towards the planet. Now Jumpships aren't stealthy, so anyone on the target planet likely detected their entrance into the system, and it typically takes Dropships seven days (varies dramatically for each star system) to reach the planet. Surprise attacks are nearly impossible, and defenders will have up to a week to get ready (some clever or smart people try to shave time by trying to match the target world's orbit with a nonstandard point closer to the planet, or even rare "Pirate" points caused by gravity interactions between celestial bodies, but even this usually gives defenders at least a day to prepare, not to mention the hilarious habit of Pirate points to just mangle dropships attempting to use them beyond recognition). Of course, these aren’t actually rare and we have quite a number of them around Earth, the moon, and every other celestial body including the sun. So close that by BattleTech standards it would take probably just a few minutes to reach the Earth from one of its own null gravity points. Seeing as their dropships can reach Sol's top or bottom null-G in just a few days.

As the invading force reaches planetary orbit, the defenders will usually try to intercept them with their own defensive ships, usually Dropships, Shuttles, Aerospace Fighters, and Conventional Fighters (like the [['Mechbuster]]) while the Attackers will launch fighters of their own. Space battle will begin in earnest as the defenders try to keep the enemy from landing on world at all (FASA originally had two separate games, Aerotech and Battlespace, that dealt with this stage of combat, but current BattleTech rules incorporate Aerospace combat for those who prefer it or want the full Theater of War experience).

If the Attackers can break through orbit, they can choose their landing site (usually near the target of course). The enemy will deploy to stop them and battle begins in earnest with ground combat typically consisting of combined arms use of infantry, battle armored troops, conventional armored vehicles, artillery, and BattleMechs. Meanwhile, any air assets in the form of aerospace or conventional fighters will duke it out to secure air superiority for shipping reinforcements via air drop or trying to take out enemy ground units from above.

==Fluff==
[[File:Mad_Cat.jpg|300px|thumb|right|The [[Timber Wolf]] (Mad Cat if you're <s>Inner Sphere</s> <s>Freebirth Scum</s> Degrazi), one of the most iconic BattleMechs in the series.]]
{{topquote|''A thousand horrid Prodigies foretold it.
A feeble government, eluded Laws,
A factious Populace, luxurious Nobles,
And all the maladies of stinking states.''|Dr. Samuel "What The Fuck Am I Reading" Johnson}}
Much like [[Games Workshop|Warhammer]], the Battletech franchise has an extensive expanded universe. Dozens of books, numerous spinoff games, video games in multiple genres, and even an animated cartoon have delved into the setting and created an entertaining, if convoluted, history that has real influences on how the game is played. Unlike Warhammer, there are no [[Xenos]] (outside of some cavemen-like species), so humans get all the glory (and blame).

===History of the Inner Sphere===
After a period of typical [[Cold War]]-era speculative history: in details, the Soviet leadership is inherited by a fictional hardliner in the 80s and the Union survives until the 2010s where it splits in the Second Soviet Civil War (this was retconned in as the game was made when the USSR hadn't collapsed yet). The appointment of a hardliner leads to NATO reforming into the Western Alliance along with the proto-EU. The Western Alliance helps the split post-Soviet Eurasian states, is joined by China and other Asian countries after a brief crisis and eventually mankind was mostly united under the Western Alliance, having renamed itself to the Terran Alliance and discovered how to travel faster-than-light by opening up artificial wormholes. By 2235, most of mankind's interstellar colonies, already mistrustful of the heavy-handed Alliance, threw off the yoke of the Alliance in the "'''Outer Reaches Rebellion'''" and formed their own stellar nation-states. What followed was a period of war and chaos which led to the rise of the "'''Great Houses'''," feudal dynasties of powerful families adhering to various pseudo-historical ideals (like Kurita's Japan fetishism, specifically the most evil aspects of WWII Japan and every other Asian countries' worst parts of their histories up to eleven) competing for total dominance of mankind. However Terra, as Earth became known after its Latin name, remained the most technologically-advanced star nation, and remained unconquered by the competing Great Houses who turned their focus on one another instead. Shortly after the eve of this "'''Age of War'''" once the Terran Alliance left the far-off colonies to fend for themselves, the Terran Alliance’s bickering political parties were subject to a coup by the charismatic Admiral James McKenna with support from the populace. He reformed the Alliance into the Terran Hegemony and eventually, his titles were inherited by a distant cousin in House Cameron. In addition, both the colonies and Terra began placing more emphasis on nobility-based peerage to handle planetary governance, education, and manufacturing instead of the loathed vote-buying that defined the corrupt Alliance. This is one of the reasons for the severe technological stagnation that is a hallmark of the Battletech universe. After all, any idiot knows that destroying a factory or all of a certain factory production and all such factories means the knowledge of how to build their products magically disappears and the knowledge of how to build those factories poofed away the moment they were built anyway as that is the only explanation conceivable for why destroyed factories were not simply replaced and why the knowledge disappeared from every paper, computer, and mind; after all, universities and libraries can still preserve knowledge while remaining civilian institutions. Obviously space magic is to blame...or exceptionally short-sighted writers who’ll wave it off as [[Medieval Stasis |neo-feudalism in space]]. The main reason for the lack of tech was due to the Terran Hegemony hoarding most of the good tech for themselves and the Star League Defence Force. ER Lasers, XL Fusion engines, Pulse Lasers and so on were all SLDF exclusives, and the vast majority of advanced tech was only produced in the Terran Hegemony, which was utterly wrecked in the [[Amaris Civil War]]. Universities and libraries were nuked alongside military targets, and the Battletech universe lacks a true internet expy, making dissemenating information even by HPG a slow, expensive process. Any advanced tech factories or research institutes left after the Amaris Civil War vanished in the nuclear firestorm of the First Succession War. It took 80 years of more or less constant warfare before the great houses decided that blowing up civillian targets wasn't such a good idea. AND THEN, Comstar decided that nobody but them should have nice things so they started assassinating anyone who might make things better and stealing their research. Nobody really bothered trying to build a new university for actual research until 3015, when the Davions built the NAIS and the moment it looked like the NAIS might actually make some progress in reversing the technological decline, Comstar tried to blow it up. They failed, and the Federated Suns figuring out that Comstar was behind the attack marked the start of the decline in Comstar's influence.

To be clear, the given reason for how the neo-feudalism came about was due to oppression, social inertia, and interstellar communication lag. Before the invention of the HPG in 2630 (5 centuries after the KF Drive) it took weeks and months for planets to send updates on their status to their national capital and the entirety of the nation. Yet other than the Federated Suns good bois and to an extent the Lyran Commonwealth, most other nations don't have the same problems that destroyed the Alliance despite being oppressive. Super oppressive. Which begs one to question how the hell the Outer Reaches Rebellion happened outside of the same tension that tore the Star League apart later. And it still doesn't explain how the neo-feudalism came about as it would make much more sense to have technocratic administrators selected by merit to manage regions of space instead of giving someone and their offspring the level of authority an ancient noble would have had. Perhaps it began the same way some monarchies are known to have: lords (or whatever name for a rose you want to use) being basically miniature kings of their local areas who united and elected a royal dynasty from among their number to handle external affairs beyond their national borders.

In 2349, the Terran Hegemony introduced the first Battlemech, the 100-ton ''Mackie'', and the face of war changed forever.

===Mechs Just Got Real===
The introduction of the ''Mackie'' shifted the focus of military development away from interstellar Warships back to ground forces. The Terran Hegemony was able to prove that the 100-ton Battlemech was far superior to conventional ground vehicles (interestingly, the Terran Hegemony's main battle tank was <s>the Israeli Merkava</s> named Merkava but utterly unrelated to the Israeli tank of the same name), allowing a single man to destroy formations of opposing non-Mechs. Of course, the rest of the Inner Sphere wanted the same capability, and in 2355 the plans for the Battlemech were stolen (as usual, the writers don’t realize that stealing a design is pointless if you don’t know how to build all the parts...like myomer (Myomer that was already a popular material throughout the Inner Sphere, used in the IndustrialMechs before the Mackie was even a concept). ). The Age of the Battlemech had begun.

During the next hundred years, as the Great Houses vied for supremacy and founded the nucleus of the future Successor States, the Terran Hegemony was able to exert great influence as the most technologically-advanced and neutral of the great powers. This would lead to the creation of the '''''Star League''''' in 2571, a grand union of all of humanity's interstellar nations. While ostensibly created for the purpose of uniting mankind and keeping the peace between the stars, it was also a massive power play by Terra to secure the raw materials it needed to maintain its technological edge and once more bring mankind under Terra's dominion. In keeping with the feudal society that now dominated mankind's worlds, the position of First Lord of the Star League was invested in Terra's ruling House, the Cameron dynasty.

While Hidden Wars would plague the Star League throughout its reign, no conflicts were fought between its members as long as the Star League Defense Force kept the peace between factions. Terra's hoard of advanced technologies were shared freely among the worlds of man, and a new Golden Age descended. It all came to an end in 2766. The last of the Camerons was assassinated by Stefan Amaris, a power-hungry politician from the Periphery, the ring of interstellar nations that had refused to join the Star League and had been conquered for their trouble. Claiming the mantle of Emperor of the Star League and Director-General of the Terran Hegemony, Amaris was immediately denounced by the commander of the SLDF, Aleksandr Kerensky.

===A New Dark Age===
[[File:Aleksandr Kerensky.jpg|thumb|right|"Fuck you guys, I'm out." - Aleksandr Kerensky, Great Father of Clans]]
The [[Amaris Civil War]] destroyed the League, and led to a new Dark Age. The Great Houses, throwing off their loyalty to Terra, refused to aid either Amaris or Kerensky, and waited for the war to pass. Kerensky emerged the victor, but with the Cameron dynasty ended the other Great Houses began to vie for position of First Lord of the Star League. Disgusted by the politicking and betrayal, in 2784 Kerensky took the greater portion of the SLDF into exile beyond the Periphery. Those who remained pledged their loyalty to the Star League's last civil authority, the Ministry of Communication, which would later become Comstar, the sole provider of internet connections between worlds. Thus the Star League lost its last measure of power, and the Great Houses began the First Succession War.

[[Succession Wars|Four Succession Wars]], over the course of two centuries, would follow. Never would a Great House gain enough strength to declare itself master of mankind, especially since none would ever conquer Terra. Technology would [[Imperium of Man|stagnate and regress]], creating the Lostech phenomenon, technology which mankind could no longer reproduce, maintain, or even understand. Where before feudalism had been a political phenomenon, hundreds of worlds across the Inner Sphere regressed to or below the technological level of the 20th Century, and hundreds more in the Periphery failed entirely. The sole bright spot was [[Adeptus Mechanicus|Comstar]], the corporate religious entity which maintained the Hyper Pulse Generator network that enabled FTL communications between inhabited worlds. Comstar became the rulers of Terra in the wake of the Star League's collapse, and leveraged their control of the HPG network to ensure their inviolability in exchange for maintaining the incomprehensible HPG networks and neutral treatment of all communications between worlds. In order to maintain their power, they would actively [[Grimdark|sabotage, headhunt, or kill]] all promising technological advancements and promising scientists to maintain their monopoly and techno-religious authority. To be fair, unlike a certain [[Adeptus Mechanicus|cargo cult]], ComStar intervened because they realized the Great Houses were psychopaths and couldn’t be allowed to advance. Also, they were actually loyal-ish to the Star League and hated the Great Houses.

Eventually the Inner Sphere would stabilize around the Great Houses and their associated stellar empires. However, technological progress remained stagnant, and the rare factories capable of producing such advanced technologies as Battlemechs became critical components in the shattered military-industrial complexes of the so-called Successor States. Millions would die so that an LED monitor factory could be taken by one side, or so that a hundred precision-machined laser lenses could be plundered from a forgotten SLDF armory. Real progress towards recovery could only be made after large caches of information which survived the fall of the Star League were recovered; the most significant were the recovery of a long-lost Star League university's library in 3013, and the recovery and free dissemination of the contents of the Helm Memory Core in 3028. In 3028, the two largest and most powerful Successor States, the Federated Suns and the Lyran Commonwealth, were united by dynastic marriage, and it seemed that a new Golden Age might be only decades away.

But the Inner Sphere had forgotten all about Kerensky's exodus, and nobody wants ''Peace'' to break out in a wargame setting, soooo...

===Suddenly Clannerscum===
Kerensky and his followers first settled on the Pentagon Worlds, where they tried to start a new society and a new Star League. They failed though, and the wars erupted between the worlds, showing the bitter irony of life. Kerensky tried to move on, but suffered a heart attack, and the leadership was overtaken by his son, Nicholas Kerensky (who unlike his father had hair and was probably a closet [[furry]]). Nicholas took the remaining followers with him to a planet he called "Dream Land" and established the twenty original Clans.

The Clans are a tribal society that is divided into five castes - Warriors (religious and political leaders and soldiers), Scientists (less respected but are considered highly important), Merchants (detested and only kept as a necessity), Technicians (engineers and warriors' servants), and Laborers (serfs, repressed as needed). Although during the birth each child is tested for their relevance to a certain caste, but more often than not are the same as their parents. Speaking of which, Clanners strongly believe in eugenics, and most of the Warrior Caste members are genetically enhanced clones/mashups. Other castes are selectively bred by the instructions from Science Caste. On a positive side it would mean that even [[neckbeard|neckbeards]] would end up breeding (though given the Clan's brutal meritocracy/kratocracy, they'd end up as outcasts in the Bandit Caste). On the other hand, the society has only a few acceptable non-technical forms of information, meaning that there really is no reason for there to be neckbeards. Paradoxes aside, Clans were created towards efficiency, and even their language differs from the one used in the Inner Sphere. Clans constantly compete in everything, from combat to technological prowess, as they foresaw their return to the Inner Sphere and its liberation. (By their hands, of course. And logically resulting in their control.)

And that day was not far off. Unfortunately for the Inner Sphere, Comstar never forgot about Kerensky's Exodus and sent exploration vessels out to sniff out their trail and reclaim lost Star League outposts on the side. When the Clans captured one of the expeditions, they believed that the Inner Sphere would invade the Pentagon worlds. Ironically, the Clans used that as an excuse to [[Clan Invasion|return and invade]] before being forced back by the very invasion they were trying to prevent.

A prophecy of days far off, the '''''ilClan''''' is a religious myth that states that someday a Clan will take control of Terra, the Cradle of Humanity. The Khan (leader) of the Clan of Clans which captures Terra will become the new, true ilKhan (Khan of Khans) and re-establish the Star League, over which their blood shall reign in perpetuity. All will be Clan, Clan will be all.

'''''ilClan''''' is also an [[Skub|abortive Battletech rulebook]] that has been in the works since '''2002''', ever since the '''Dark Age''' Era was published. Ostensibly intended to be the next historical Era, featuring all new rules to reflect the dominance of Clan society and technology, the bankruptcies and sales that Battletech went through stalled all development. In addition, most fans are [[Advancing the Storyline|vehemently opposed to the destruction of most of the factions]] in the game, and have spoken up at every opportunity to denounce the plans behind ilClan. A prank release of a provisional ilClan historical outline drew tremendous outcry and Catalyst Game Labs has subsequently decided to focus on rereleasing and updating older Era rulesets.

===Meanwhile, In The Inner Sphere===
...Of course, when the Clans returned to the Inner Sphere with the intent of liberating it from the feuding Great Houses, those same great houses <s>said "okay" and handed over the reins</s> put aside their differences and fought the Clans to a stand-still. This was an incredible show of camaraderie, and the most cooperative the houses had been since the Star League fell. It was all quite touching, really.

Sort of. The Clan invasion was getting bogged down and while they were making progress towards Terra it seemed like the new normal would be just constant unending war because they couldn't manage to put any of the successors away for good. ComStar, the self-serving treacherous pricks that they are, decided that something needed to be done and so made the Clans a bet. The deal was, come to Tukayyid and fight our best in one big PROVE YOUR WORTH honorduel smackup. If the Clans won, ComStar would stab all the successors in the back, disconnect their HPG access and throw the doors to Terra wide open. If ComStar won, the Clans would agree to a fifteen year armistice.

The Clans, being honourable glory-seeking meatheads, agreed and converged on Tukayyid, dividing up objectives between Clans thinking that this was the beginning of the glorious endgame. All the while blissfully unaware that ComStar are every bit the cheating bastards you'd expect of an ISP in space with their own army. The Battle of Tukayyid wasn't a complete shutout for the Clans but it definitely illustrated that they still hadn't figured out how to actually win wars. In most of the engagements the Com Guard pounded the Clanners like discount tenderloin and because of their stubborn honourable ways the Clanners were obliged to abide by the cease fire by the logic of no-takey-backsies.

And then once the Clans were wrapped up behind a truce line it was time to get back to good-old inter-house wars. In an ultra-brief summary: There was the FedCom Civil War, kicking off the <s>Fifth Succession War</s> Word of Blake Jihad, the religious fanatic (well, moreso than usual) faction of Comstar went crazy over the entire Inner Sphere with cyborgs and nukes, until some dude named Devlin Stone got everyone to work together and kick them off Terra, then went on to form the Republic of the Sphere, essentially a re-establishment of the Terran Hegemony. In the meantime, the Clans got a bug up their asses over ideological purity after their Scientist Castes tried to take over, and all the Clans who invaded the Inner Sphere got kicked out of Clan Space to live there instead. Eventually someone forgot to pay the phone bill and the interstellar faster-than-light communication network went down. This ushered in the last era in the fluff known as the "Dark Age."

This is also considered the second ruination of the franchise by some. Many long-time fans think highly of the Succession Wars era of Battletech, right after the fall of the Star League. Marching around the field with walking tanks so expensive and rare that it's better to lose a pilot than a weapon is a powerful fantasy. It's often described as being "Mad Max with mechs." Of course, the blasted hellscape of the post-apocalypse is hard to maintain when the Clans invaded with their own brand-new shiny toys.
The shift from "squabbling tribes with rusty guns" to "courageous defenders with shiny factories" is often considered the first ruination of the property. When the squabbling of the Inner Sphere was broken up again by quasi-religious zealots and Battletech was forced to stitch in apocrypha from its bastard child, the miniature game MechWarrior: Dark Age, people considered it the second collapse of the franchise.

===ilClan Era <strike>Dawn of a New Age, or Not</strike>===
In 2019 Catalyst released '''Shattered Fortress''', the first half of a two-sourcebook set intended to finally advance the franchise into a post-Dark Age era. It ended with a cliffhanger: on New Year's Day 3150 a Clan fleet lands on Terra, but we don't know which Clan. Continuing the recurring theme of Battletech players not caring one bit about advancing the storyline, the release of the second book was then delayed indefinitely by the massive success of a Kickstarter offering more new miniatures and rules set 100 years back on the timeline. While each republished or recompiled rulebook has prologues hinting that the ilClan and Third Star League are around in 3250 from framing documents as archival material, details were deliberately [[Skub|left vague]]. Come 2021, and the novels have finally pushed the timeline out of the Dark Age, reception has been... [[Derp|eh]]. While some factions and characters got a lot of development and [[Awesome|heroic action]], many others were [[Rage|given the shaft]] or reduced to 2D [[FAIL|caricactures when they had potential for development]].

On January 1st, 2021 the novel ''Hour of the Wolf'' was released. Long story short, the Wolf Khan managed to get his hands on a way to bypass the Fortress Walls (unknown to most, Devlin Stone snuck them the access codes as he believed they were the least terrible of bad outcomes). Clans Wolf and Jade Falcon then beat the shit out of the Republic of the Sphere (but not before having the bulk of their commanders assassinated by headhunter units), fought a Trial of Possession for Terra, and the Wolves won. So, Clan Wolf is now ilClan. Their Khan made the Jade Falcons his clan's bodyguard (the bad elements having died fighting), and reconstituted Clan Smoke Jaguar as a non-voting clan and to serve as his clan's black ops/special forces. These Clans then created a new Star League (to a point). And with the combined might of these admittedly terribly mangled clans now strengthened by working together, they might actually make something of themselves. Others in the setting might not recognize them yet, but with the industrial might of the region(s) of space they occupy, they'll probably end up smashing faces and making it clear whose boss. Or they'll get booted off or everyone will just wait for them to self-destruct and then just walk right in.

==Factions Summary==
While each faction has a certain flavor and preferred equipment/tactics, factions do not limit your gameplay choices to particular sets of mechs/units/components, as in many other games ([[Warhammer 40,000]] is a good example, amongst many other skirmish-level wargames). So if something you want to use is in specific era of Battletech History (FEDCOM Civil War, Clan Invasion, et cetera), anything goes. Although it's common for players to roleplay as being employed by some major power, and limiting themselves to their styles. Either that or they play as mercenaries and do as they please. Seriously, the amount of in-fighting is in effect galactic level (in Warhammer 40k -- aside from humanity itself -- only the ''Necrontyr'', the flesh incarnations of the [[Necrons]], ever fought each other to such a long and drawn out extent).

===The Inner Sphere===
While other time periods might have better or more interesting rules, the most popular ruleset remains the eras between the Fourth Succession War (3028) to just before the Word of Blake Jihad (3067). This list of Inner Sphere factions covers those periods.

====[[Federated Suns]]====
Ruled by House Davion, the Federated Suns is feudal Space America or nepotistic Space UK. [[Lawful Good]], ruled by a Great House as inbred as any other is, and with all positions of power occupied by the same set of mostly blood-related elites. Without the blue blood, you're just a clever commoner. However, the Federated Suns isn't as stratified as the other Successor States, and it's easier for a common citizen to climb the ladders of wealth and power, which fuels an entrepreneurial society that is among the wealthiest in the Inner Sphere. They’re heroic defenders of freedom and democracy, provided you define “freedom and democracy” as “being ruled by the Federated Suns”. Their colors are red, white, and blue. Something about that sounds strangely familiar...

Similar to [[Ultramarines|a certain faction in a certain other wargame]], the Federated Suns usually win most of their battles, and are usually presented as the good guys, drawing a lot of accusations of Mary Suehood. Unfairly, though, as the FedSuns win so much due to wealth-fueled research and production. In other words, they work hard, do a good job, encourage businesses, and they get rewarded with victory. Unlike the Smurfs, however, the Federated Suns has actual flaws - their “democracy” is a rubber stamp, their rhetoric about freedom is mostly just an excuse to justify warmongering and imperialism, and they have such a staggering degree of wealth inequality that there are cases where the populations of multiple planets only have a single school to go between them. This means that the FedSuns attract two kinds of fans: twelve-year-olds who buy all the propaganda, and people who can appreciate playing a bunch of self-righteous, hypocritical jackasses. On the bright side, they do live up to the hype when it comes to individual liberties, and their rulers are genuinely competent and mostly don't dick them over.

Thanks to their great wealth, the Federated Suns can afford to fund actual scientific research in the form of the New Avalon Institute of Science, or Space MIT, and the Davions supported most of the tech development and recovery in the Inner Sphere prior to the Clan Invasion. They also got lucky when they found an ancient Star League library filled with various editions of tabletop wargame splatbooks. They are known to be the house that first heavily employed or utilized a lot of Clan personnel and technologies after the conclusion of the invasion.

The Federated Suns also kind of have a thing for autocannons. Think [[Space Wolves]] with wolves, or [[Orks]] with [[Dakka]], and you have an idea. If it does not have an autocannon on it the Suns will find a way to give it one, and if it does have an autocannon they find a way to upgrade it to a rotary autocannon. So if you like autocannons (and you should) this is the faction for you.

Prior to the Fourth Succession War, the Federated Suns and Lyran Commonwealth were united through marriage (technically the political union was a treaty and the marriage was out of love and had no impact on the nations' unification), forming the Federated Commonwealth, the largest and most powerful empire in the galaxy since the Star League. In order to bridge the distance between the two nations, however, the Federated Commonwealth had to conquer large swathes of the Capellan Confederation, which they did easily. However, only a few decades later the Commonwealth was broken up by the FedCom Civil War, when Katherine Steiner-Davion schemed to either take over the Commonwealth or secede the Lyran half of it because she was a royal bitch. She is commonly known as simply The Bitch by many fans. And her splitting of the FedCom is incredibly weird since her nobles were against her, her military mostly liked the advantages brought by the FedSuns, and her public liked the massive boosts in economy and technological progress. Oh, and she was rebel usurper and had no authority to do any of the things she did. So her successful secession doesn't make a lick of sense and you just kinda have to suck it up. And to top it off, she had her mother murdered out of greed. The FedSuns are currently getting kicked around by pretty much everybody during the Dark Age, primarily because the current head of the house, Caleb, is extremely paranoid and rather psychotic.Thankfully he got killed by the Kuritans with some insider help from Clan Snow Raven (in exchange for some buffer territory). Not so thankfully, his death also brought the destruction a major chunk of the Davions' regular armed forces concentrated on one planet while enabling the Kuritans to take over the capital. Kuritans being what they're like, they probably raped and tortured everyone they didn't murder and alongside their dogs. <strike>''Save us, Julian!''</strike>

====[[Lyran Commonwealth]]====
[[File:Steiner Assault.jpg|350px|right|thumb|A typical scene of a Lyran Archon wondering why their cousin has failed to relieve the Commonwealth alongside a bloody frontline against their enemies. They're likely either at a ball dance or planning a coup.]]
Space Germany with some Space Scotland and Space Scandinavia kicking around, the Lyran Commonwealth is the largest successor state and owns the most resource-rich planets in the Inner Sphere, making them an industrial and economic powerhouse. Their government was supposed to be modeled on ancient Athens, led by a council of nine Archons, but this did not work out ''at all'', and eventually Archon Robert Marsden decided he'd had enough of this shit and overthrew the other Archons in a military coup. The Marsdens were eventually replaced by the Steiners via marriage, who have ruled the Commonwealth to this day.

The Lyrans are rich. Really, really absurdly rich. The only reason they haven't conquered the Inner Sphere yet is that they prefer to put the relatives of rich businessmen in charge of their army rather than, y'know, actual soldiers, meaning basically every Lyran military officer is terrible at their job. There is at least one recorded case of the Lyran military starting a major interstellar war ''by accident''. Fortunately, since they're so rich, they're able to make up for their ludicrous incompetence with the biggest and heaviest weapons in the Inner Sphere. The joke goes that a typical Steiner scout lance consists of four 100-ton '''''Atlas''''' mechs (imagine a scout-recon team composed entirely of [[Warlord Battle Titan|Warlord Titans]] and you'll get the idea). Steiner forces tend to be big and slow, barely able to outmaneuver enemy fortresses. Of course, once they (eventually) get into range, you can kiss that fortress goodbye.

Late in the Third Succession War, Archon Katrina Steiner shocked the entire Inner Sphere by actually calling for a peace treaty. Only Hanse Davion was at all interested, and he wound up marrying Katrina's daughter Melissa and uniting the two countries into one massive empire, the Federated Commonwealth (see above). Predictably, this Beauty-and-the-Geek romance started out exceedingly awesome then epically failed and it's back to single life for the too-pretty Steiners. They recently tried to have Clan Wolf migrate through their coreward territory to keep the Free Worlds League from reforming during the Dark Age while holding the transported civilian castes as insurance. The plan backfired with the Free Worlds League still reforming and Clan Wolf taking much of the coreward and middle territory in the Lyran Commonwealth to form the Wolf Empire. This, on top of a massive amount of civil unrest means the Lyrans are too busy with damage control from Wolf and Jade Falcon invasions along with internal rebellions to be a threat to anyone. The moral of the story is: don’t try to manipulate badasses who nearly conquered everyone without trying. They will fuck you up for it. Also, trying to hold civilians hostage against a culture that thinks civilians are barely human at all is pointless. It tends to go like "Okay, I'll kill a bunch of your people and conquer chunks of your territory". You threaten to kill the civilians and your enemy is totally incapable of understanding why they should care when they treat them as replaceable subjects instead of irreplaceable citizens. Come the rise of the IlClan on Terra and there’s a sudden power vacuum where the Jade Falcon occupation zone to the North use to be. This led to a massive Balkan-style disintegration of the said region alongside the Lyran’s northern provinces; many of resulting statelets are very ticked off at the Steiners for leaving them to rot. While Jade Falcons are barely around in the region, holdout territories and other Clans like the Hell’s Horses and Ghost Bears are eyeing the new buffer zone cautiously before seeking new planets to annex.

====[[Free Worlds League]]====
Taking elements from America, Yugoslavia, and Austria-Hungary, the Free Worlds League is a federal democratic republic. No, really! They have a parliament and everything. Of course, the commander-in-chief of the Free Worlds League Military is always a member of House Marik because parliament doesn’t think anyone else can do the job, and the entire country has been operating under martial law “for the duration of the emergency” since the Star League broke up. But in principle, both democracy and federalism are alive and well in Marik space, making it impossible to get anything done. Think of the Free Worlds League as Space Holy Roman Empire due to regionalist nationalism.

Everyone in the Free Worlds League hates everyone else in the Free Worlds League; the only thing keeping them together is mutual animosity to the Lyrans, Capellans, and Periphery bandits raiding their borders. After finding out that Captain-General Thomas Marik had been in hiding running the Word of Blake for decades and the guy they’d been taking their orders from all that time was actually just some hobo picked up off the street, they gave up on trying to make the thing work at all and collapsed. Which is a shame because fake Marik was actually one of the best Captain-Generals they ever had. After the Dark Age, said hobo’s daughter managed to put it back together again, which kind of makes you start to wonder about that whole “only the Mariks can handle the Captaincy-General” thing. Doesn't help that she had to make a deal with the Spirit Cat and Sea Fox clanners to cement the whole thing together as well as marrying the official Marik family's head.

The Free Worlds League Military is built around combined arms warfare, treating infantry, vehicles, and aerospace fighters as if they were just as useful as mechs. They also used to have the most LAMs back before [[squat|LAMs ceased to be a thing]]. They don’t get a lot of attention, since they’re far away from the FedSuns and the Clans and therefore don’t get involved in stories about factions the writers actually care about. The constant in-fighting probably doesn't help. That said, they most likely do enough to keep their jobs, which is probably good enough to satisfy the average Joe, who couldn't care less about political squabbles. Recent lore hints they’re probably at the forefront of the IlClan’s attention now due to Leaguers eager to reconquer their lost territory. Whether they get out of the border war in one piece is up for debate.

====[[Draconis Combine]]====
Ruled by House Kurita, the Draconis Combine is the obligatory Space Japan, in the sense that it is ''obligatory'' to be Japanese. It has large Arab and Scandinavian minorities who are legally required to be [[weeaboo]]s, with the country as a whole drawing on both the age of samurai and the militaristic Imperial Japan of the 1920s to 40s. The twelve-year-olds listed above, if they leave the FedSuns, will likely move to this weeaboo paradise with its delusional "fierce solo samurai warrior takes on all opponents Kurosawa Style" appeal, not realizing that lone mechs get [[rape|gang-banged]] by enemies who are teamed up like a pack of mechanical hyenas. Defended by weeaboos despite being responsible for the single most horrific massacre in human history during the First Succession War. For an alternate look into this supposed massacre, please read ''Did 52 million really die?'' In fact, they have a habit of doing this. “We defeated the mercenaries on this planet who have nothing to do with the general populace. Nuke everyone before we leave. Why? Uhhhh...do we really need a reason? <s>they’re not our enemies or anything, but [[Lulz|murder is fun]]</s> SCORCHED EARTH TACTICS! Preventing enemies from using the planet’s populace or resources against us is a valid strategy!”

Like everyone else in the Inner Sphere, the Draconis Combine is a warmongering, autocratic empire ruled with an iron fist that wants to take over the galaxy. Unlike everyone else in the Inner Sphere, they actually admit it. They're the only successor state that makes absolutely no pretenses of being a democracy, with the Coordinator of Worlds being treated as a divinely anointed absolute monarch who is the sole legitimate ruler of all humanity. They were the first to start shit after the Star League collapsed, with the Coordinator declaring himself the new First Lord and launching an invasion of the Federated Suns that eventually wound up getting him killed on Kentares IV, prompting his son to launch the aforementioned massacre. They've been the mortal enemies of the Federated Suns ever since.

Similar to the Davions and their love of autocannons and the Steiners and their love of everything heavy and assault, Kuritans are really, really into PPCs (Particle Projector Cannons), mainly because they're dirt poor and [[Lasgun]]s are cheaper than bullets. If there is a mech that can possibly mount a PPC, the Dracs will put one on it. For instance, see the ''Catapult'': a 65-ton long-range fire support mech intended for indirect fire using the Long Range Missle (LRM) racks in its "ears". Almost every variant of the ''Catapult'' is centered around these LRM racks with a few minor backup weapons. They are a reliable, battle-tested design that no commander in their right mind would attempt to 'fix', because isn't broken... except in the eyes of House Kurita. Once the Combine got their hands on it those ears were replaced with two PPCs for direct fire support and two machine guns for <s>civilian massacres</s> INFANTRY DETERRENTS.

Kuritans were also [[Fail|involved in the worst Battletech novel ever written]], wherein a ship of theirs was lost in time and space, and [[what|found giant]], [[Kroot|alien, sentient chickens]]. Far Country is a [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6zQ6ZqEqg0 Shamefur Dispray]! and pretty much serves as the only time aliens are actually mentioned in the BattleTech universe.

====[[Capellan Confederation]]====
Culturally, Space China and Space Russia. Politically, Space North Korea. The Confederation was originally founded when several minor states in the Capellan Zone who were sick of the Federated Suns trying to "liberate" them joined together, [[lolwut|bombed their own capital of Capella to make a point]], and fought the Davions off. Secure in this victory, they then proceeded to never win a war ever again. Sounds like their rulers were evil after all.

Citizens of the Capellan Confederation enjoy probably the highest standard of living of any commoner in the Inner Sphere, with an extensive, cradle-to-grave welfare system and the best education and health care the state can provide. [[Grimdark|*Non*-citizens of the Capellan Confederation, known as "Servitors", are basically slaves.]] Becoming a citizen requires you to provide a certain amount of service to the state by the age of seventeen, and citizenship can be removed as punishment for disloyalty. Even those who aren't unfortunate enough to be Servitors basically have their lives decided for them by the Capellan caste system and the government's ability to tell them that they have to move to a new planet and take up a new career at any given moment. The writers might have eventually gotten the note on how pointless this was because under chancellor Sun-Tzu (No, really) Liao in 3052 the servitors were awarded more rights, their quasi slavery condition abolished and they were given better chances at gaining citizenship, boosting Sun-Tzu's popularity in the process. Just as planned.

The Confederation is run by a Chancellor, who's supposed to be elected by the nobility but in reality is pretty much always the head of House Liao. This is rather unfortunate, since the Liaos have a noticeable tendency towards being batshit fucking insane ''even by Inner Sphere nobility standards''. They claim descent from Elias Liao, who was either a persecuted revolutionary philosopher (if you ask a Capellan) or a psychopathic nuclear terrorist (if you ask anyone else). The main family line births a homicidal maniac at least every other generation, e.g. Kali Liao, who became the leader of a cyborg death cult with a taste for mass nerve-gas attacks. At one point, they decided that having a regular military just wasn't cool enough for them and created the Warrior Houses, a bunch of weird pseudo-religious warrior cults that only answer to the Chancellor.

Since the Capellans have lost basically every war they've ever fought and live right next to the Federated Suns, they've become the designated "sneaky" faction, focusing on guerrilla warfare and covert operations. They go for stealth and electronic warfare the way the Davions go for autocannons, best exemplified by their iconic Raven electronic warfare 'Mech (which, depending on the model, actually looks like a bird; weird but cool). After the Clan Invasion and FedCom Civil War, they acquired a taste for the newly-developed Plasma weapons. Got the absolute shit beat out of them by the Federated Commonwealth during the Fourth Succession War, got revenge when the Commonwealth tore itself apart a few decades later.

====[[ComStar]]====
Imagine a cross between the medieval Catholic Church and Comcast, and you have ComStar. During the Star League Civil War, the network of Hyperpulse Generators that the Star League had built for faster-than-light communications was in ruins, and the one thing that the Great Houses could agree on was that ''somebody'' had to fix all their space phones right fucking now. They named Jerome Blake, the highest-ranking HPG network official still alive, as Minister of Communications, which, since they didn't name any other ministers, basically put him in charge of Terra. As the Star League collapsed, Blake bummed some soldiers off of Kerensky, got the Successor States to agree that the space phones were important and they should therefore respect ComStar's neutrality, and then seized complete control of Terra in a lightning-fast coup, revealing that that neutrality had some teeth.

After Blake died, ComStar quickly turned into a quasi-mystical and religious organization, whose stated purpose was to preserve human knowledge in the dark ages of the Succession Wars, a goal they attempted to fulfill by assassinating every scientist who wouldn't work for them and starting the Second Succession War practically the moment the first one ended. Things started to spiral out of control for them after the Helm Memory Core was leaked and suddenly everyone was able to figure out how Lostech worked again, and then things got even ''worse'' when the Clans showed up.

ComStar is also famous for introducing the ComStar Bill (C-bill) as a standard galactic currency. Rather than being backed by material goods, each C-bill is backed by ComStar's faster than light message delivery service: One C-bill will guarantee one millisecond of data transmission, enough for a few pages of bare text or a small image, with larger transmissions costing more, and with additional fees for higher priority and the like. The value of the various Great House currencies can be weighed against their worth in C-bills which allows for currency exchange on a galactic scale. The C-bill is the primary way that mercenaries are paid and in turn pay for goods and services, and thus the most common currency encountered by players. Post Jihad, Comstar was neutered of its armed forces and subject to a hostile takeover by Clan Sea Fox (outside of the universe, at least one of the game developers had a hate boner against Comstar's OP status and gave their more powerful components the ax, courtesy of Blakist nukes).

====Minor Powers====
*'''[[Free Rasalhague Republic]]''': Space Norse/Vikings. They were a part of the Draconis Combine along the Lyran border, until the formation of the Federated Commonwealth meant that Kurita was about to have ''two'' borders for Hanse Davion to attack them from, so he granted them their independence as a buffer state. May have been awesome. If you're wondering why we write of them in the past tense refer to: ''Clan Invasion, Why Not Get in the Way of One'' (Third Publishing of Liao, COMSTAR ISBN 474-Alpha-467-Upsilon-345). They later join up with the Ghost Bears and become the Rasalhague Dominion. They are awesome because now we have Viking clanners. One of their aerospace pilots literally stopped the Clan invasion dead for an entire year because she banzai'd her fighter into a Clan warship and killed the ilKhan.
*'''[[Word of Blake]]''': An ultra-reactionary splinter faction of ComStar that got butthurt after ComStar ditched all the pseudo-religious bullshit. Broke away and launched an all-out jihad(''yes, they actually used that word'') on literally everyone shortly after the Federated Commonwealth Civil War came to an end. Made liberal use of weapons of mass destruction and rendered several entire planets uninhabitable. Fond of genocide, re-education camps, unstable technology, and mass murder. As a result, they were eventually crushed as a result of pissing off the entire fucking universe, but not before undoing a lot of the technological progress that had been made after the Clan Invasion (apparently by magic, as not only was that knowledge now universally available, but so were copies of the Helm Memory Core...and destroying some factories doesn’t make technology go away). Basically used by the publishers to reset the average technology level of the game due to a lot of players feeling it was advancing too far and getting away from the quasi-feudal feel of earlier editions (forgetting that quasi-feudalism is a governing method, the technology level has nothing to do with it). Ironically enough, their mechs were more streamlined and featured a lot more experimental technologies for people who would eventually blow the entire game setting back to the quasi-iron age. Officially, they were all supposedly killed after the Jihad for genocide. Recently hinted by a terminally ill Stone to still be around and responsible for the HPG network being taken out as a taunt against ilKhan Alaric before being killed off in bed.
*'''The [[Republic of the Sphere]]''': Established by an individual calling himself Devlin Stone, who mysteriously surfaced at some point during the Blakefag Jihad, and helped pull the galaxy out that colossal clusterfuck through a series of successful military campaigns. Upon the Jihad's defeat, Stone met with ComStar Precentor Martial Victor Ian Steiner-Davion and laid out a philosophy which Victor would privately describe as ''militant socialism keyed to altruism''; Officials and authorities would have their assets placed in a blind trust. Public service would be rewarded. Greed and corruption would be punished. All weapons would be placed under government control. [[Just As Planned|Surprisingly, it worked]], at least for a time, ushering in a new era of peace for the core worlds. However, after ruling as Exarch of the Republic for a while, Devlin Stone stepped down and shortly there after disappeared, vowing to [[Sigmar|return when he was needed most]]. It didn't take long before everything went to shit again and was plunged into chaos when the interstellar communication network was sabotaged. Was gangbanged by a combination of separatist factions, the Capellans, and Clan Jade Falcon before finally saying FUCK IT and retreating back to Terra. All while somehow using Word of Blake HPG disruption tech to prevent hyperspace jumps into their core territory. They also recently developed a taste for Tripod Mechs (which are the only modern Mech that can exceed Assault Mechs in terms of tonnage, firepower, and armor but at the cost of requiring an additional gunner and engineer onboard to shoot and monitor the machine's vitals) while also hybridizing Clan & IS technology (culminating with extremely powerful but unstable weapons). <strike>''You guys realize Stone is the [[Emperor]], right? Right?''</strike> None of this makes sense, of course, as the HPG network is not only extremely well and fanatically protected by actual fanatics, but also is so large it can’t really be sabotaged. Except by magically competent Deus ex Machina mooks, apparently. Friendly clans could also build their own for the Republic’s use. Except newly built HPGs also failed somehow. Black Boxes became advanced enough that HPGs were nearly pointless, though, making the whole “Dark Age” thing really...dumb. And if someone had the sense to build building-sized Black Boxes instead of briefcase-sized, the HPGs would have a perfect backup. But common sense in Battletech is [[heresy]] just like in any good universe. Besides that, the eyes on anyone with power to prevent corruption would stop factions from selling out the Republic and the senators would not have been able to sponsor military officers into becoming Paladins because that is extremely corrupt and would not have been allowed or tolerated. Even if such a plot succeeded, there would be no leverage for the senators to get those paladins to do what they wanted. And the Capellans are target practice, sudden separatism makes no sense when they were fine until this point under numerous oppressive regimes, and Clan Jade Falcon by itself would have been crushed and a team up of clans would have sent the whole Inner Sphere into a clan-killing frenzy panic mode. Come the latest novels in 2021, and the Republic and it's founder were reduced to a caricature of fall of the III Reich (complete with a senile leader giving contradictory orders and throwing their best units at the worst faction so the best faction can pick up the pieces). While many of their leaders and fighters survived, it's an open question of whether they cooperate with the ilClan or revolt later down the line.
** '''Northwind Highlanders''': A band of Scottish mercenaries hailing from the planet Northwind. Once upon a time they were a formal Royal Guard unit for House Cameron in the SLDF but they went free agent when the Star League fell apart, after which they mostly worked for House Liao. They got a surprise happy blakesday party that destroyed their HPG and wiped out their aerofighters but otherwise they survived and joined the Republic in 3081. With the Fall of the Republic, they were forced to surrender with their leader loaned as a liaison from the IlClan to the Jade Falcons; which is notable due to both factions historically and currently originating from, the Black Watch, elite SLDF units working as bodyguards for the First Lord of the Star League and nearly prevented the [[Amaris Civil War]].
* '''[[The Periphery]]''': The collection of non-successor states on the edges of the Inner Sphere. They were brought into the Star League by force and are still kinda sore about it, mostly because they nearly got blasted back to the Stone Age and never quite got their technology back up. The most important entities (outside of the Clans) are the Periphery powers bordering the Great Houses in the Inner Sphere while the rest is marked as the Deep Periphery and is as isolated from civilization as the Arctic Circle from the rest of civilization.
**'''[[Taurian Concordate]]''': A Periphery nation bordering the Federated Suns and Cappellan Confederation. Has an axe to grind against the Federated Suns and claims they’re much more dedicated to freedom and liberty than the Davions. Think the United States right after 9/11, all of the good and the bad, and you have a good idea of the culture. Just replace paranoia about Islam with paranoid about the Federated Suns, including the fact that the overwhelming majority of who they're paranoid couldn't given any less of a shit about them.
**'''Marian Hegemony''': A bandit kingdom bordering the Lyrans and Free Worlds League that decided to become the Roman Empire IN SPACE. A shadier version of the [[Severan Dominate]] from 40k.
**'''[[Magistracy of Canopus]]''': A hedonistic matriarchy bordering the Free Worlds League. A nation of cybernetic catgirls, whose largest export is pornography. No, really. We're serious. Well they're not all cybernetic catgirls but they're there if you want them, and pornography and the tourist industry makes up a large chunk of their economy. Also Medical research and technology, most likely to treat all the STDs you get from your vacation to Space Vegas. Also known for having a significant religious conservatives population as they have an open-door refugee policy.
**'''[[Outworlds Alliance]]''': A backwater state near the Federated Suns and Draconis Combine. Was the Periphery-est of the Periphery states until Clan Snow Raven moved in and formed the '''Raven Alliance'''.
**'''Hanseatic League''': A mercantile alliance of traders descended from Lyran refugees fleeing economic declines during the Third Succession War, their nation is between the Clan Homeworlds and Lyran Space. They liked to pretend to be a neutral third party interested in trade of goods and information while also subjecting neighboring planets to debt trap diplomacy with armed merchant caravans. Also liked to play both sides against each other in any prolonged war among their neighbors to increase profits and soften them up for potential annexation (such as between Nueva Castille and the Umayyad Caliphate). Unfortunately, they were eventually conquered by Clan Goliath Scorpion (with help from their newfound Castilian and Umayyad citizens) and merged into their new Scorpion Empire some time in the Dark Age.
*'''Mercenary Review and Bonding Commission''': An independent group that certifies and provides force rankings for various [[Mercenaries (Battletech)|mercenary groups]]. At least three Mech Warrior games are focused on the mercs as it allows writers more leeway and less chance to screw up the canon.
**'''Kell Hounds''': A merc company headed by Morgan Kell. His son Phelan was captured by Clan Wolf when the Clan Invasion first began, and by the end was running the Clan until it split. Took in Phelan and the Exiled Wolves afterwards. Generally, are tough but cool guys all around. Like the Exiled Wolves, they got a massive "kill on sight" target painted on their back after the omnicidal Jade Falcon Khan got annoyed with their feisty resistance against her campaign into Lyran Territory. Once the Jade Falcons scrambled the bulk of their military forces to Terra, the Kell Hounds were able to retake their homeworld when the Jade Falcon occupation zone and Lyran northernmost territories balkanized from the power vacuum. On the other hand, their commander has a big grudge against the Steiners for leaving them out to dry.
**'''Grey Death Legion''': Mercenary group who were famous for finding and distributing the Helm Core, which allowed the Inner Sphere to regain technology formerly lost during the Succession Wars. Generally an author's favorite in the books. Got destroyed during the Blake Jihad.
**'''Wolf's Dragoons''': A bunch of Clan Wolf advance scouts disguised as a mercenary group. Came to the Inner Sphere with a ton of mechs that the Clans considered outdated but hadn't been seen in the Successor States in centuries and were considered Lostech... Which should have tipped the Great Houses off that these guys might be bad juju. Instead of providing intel to the Clans for their invasion, Wolf's Dragoons pulled a fast one and tried to prepare the Inner Sphere for war with the Clans. They are generally pretty awesome guys, even if part of that awesomeness is because they get a ton of attention in the fluff due to the writers' obsession with anything related to Clan Wolf. They got screwed pretty badly during the Blake Jihad when the nutjobs assaulted Outreach. By Dark Age they are slowly recovering with help from the Kell Hounds. Recent novellas have the Wolves convince them to join them on Terra once it's conquered to prevent the genocidal Jade Falcons from becoming the IlClan. Unfortunately, latest novels also made them become meatshields used by the Wolf Khan to expend the Turquoise Turkeys' ammo supplies while being reduced to a fraction of their strength. Naturally, in a repeat of their history against Kurita, they [[Book of Grudges|swore]] an oath to stand against the Wolves permanently.

===[[The Clans]]===
Laughable strategic and logistical ability and basically have no plan when they do something. But God have mercy on you if they're coming your way. 'Cus you're '''''fucked'''''. These guys reside in the [[Deep Periphery]] and tried to leave well enough alone with the Spheroid barbarians their SLDF ancestors disowned until Space AT&T knocked on their front door like an unsolicited salesman. The resulting "GTFO my lawn" response naturally made the Innner Sphere soil their pants. Each clan is named after an animal, and yes those are the animal's full names.

* Clan Blood Spirit: The smallest clan. Noted for having the toughest training, favored Battle Armor, and had no official allies after starting off idealistic but then becoming jaded grudge-holders. :( Despite above comment, not ACTUALLY an animal, but named for the warrior spirit that united the forces under Kerensky.
* Clan Burrock: The only clan to support the Dark Caste. Liked picking on the Blood Spirits before they were absorbed by Clan Star Adder.
* Clan Cloud Cobra: The Religious types. Loved aerospace fighters and jump jets. Obsessed with collecting genetic bloodlines other clans don't want.
* Clan Coyote: Native Americans in Space. Also like to scheme too much for their own good. Known for creating a shit ton of tech (unlike [[Adeptus Mechanicus|some people]] on Mars...)
* Clan Diamond Shark: Used to be called Sea Fox until Snow Raven killed their namesake (with their current one) the only clan that views the merchant caste as equal to their warrior one. Later brought back the Sea Fox and changed their name back. The only clan to allow all castes to vote, making them arguably a genuinely democratic republic.
* Clan Fire Mandrill: The clan whose gimmick was to always have a few subfactions to foster internal competition. At first it was manageable and it improved the clan, but then the factionalism snowballed into more than 10 mini-subfactions which made the whole clan a laughing stock among the clans.
* Clan Ghost Bear: The only clan to be founded by a married couple, as a result they're the only clan to still have normal family units. Much more protective of its civilian caste than the others. Nearly devoured the Free Rashalague Republic in the Clan Invasion, then merged with what was left after the Jihad. Went full blown good old fashion Viking Berserker when the Jihad nuked their civilians, attacking friend and foe alike in pure grief fueled murderous rage. Awesome.
* Clan Goliath Scorpion: Stoners with rose-colored nostalgia glasses. Also noted for elite marksmanship and ambush tactics. Likes to [[Blood Ravens|acquire artifacts]] [[Trazyn the Infinite|for cultural appreciation of the Star League]], sometimes with bad consequences down the line.
* Clan Hell's Horses: The only clan to think tanks are useful, often uses combined arms tactics rather than just spamming mechs. They have a hot rod flames color scheme. Extremely heavily focused on teamwork. Including teamwork between castes and between the clan and its conquered worlds. Which has led to very good relations both internally and externally. Probably the only Clan other than the Star Adders that locals might actually support over a "liberating" Inner Sphere force. ''Maybe''.
* Clan <strike>Temper Tantrum</strike> Ice Hellion: Speed freaks with a big ego. Their Khan seems to bitch every time their forces lose, which is often.
* Clan Jade Falcon: The spotlight stealing clan second only to the Wolves, with whom they have a fierce rivalry. Slightly less evil than the Jaguars.
* Clan Mongoose: Basically a footnote in clan history. Extremely aggressive, tend to attack everyone near them. [[Fail|Got their asses kicked by everyone else before being absorbed.]]
* Clan Nova Cat: The spiritual types, they decide their policy with visions, which 9 times out of 10 ends badly for them. Some of the best marksmen in the clans, often competed with Clan Goliath Scorpion. Joined Smoke Jaguar in attacking the Draconis Combine, then sided with the Combine right after everyone decided the Jags had to go. Eventually got destroyed during the Dark Ages for backing the wrong Kuritan royal in a civil war.
* Clan <strike>Chimney Kitten</strike> Smoke Jaguar: Essentially super aggressive [[World Eaters]] trained to pilot mechs. Known to fuck shit up until their smaller numbers (due to infighting, shitting on their civilian castes and hating logistics) fucked them over in long campaign. Were eventually wiped out by the Inner Sphere counter-attack after they murdered an entire city from orbit. What goes around comes around. Recent ilClan lore had their descendants in the Fidelis sworn to the Wolf Khan in exchange for rebuilding their clan; [[What|despite]] their original [[Book of Grudges|hatred]] for letting the Second Star League annihilate them.
* Clan Snow Raven: The sinister & cunning space jockeys of the clans. Specialized in space combat and became BBFs with the Outworlds Alliance.
* Clan Spirit Cats: Offshoots of the Nova Cats after they were annihilated by the Combine.
* Clan Star Adder: Boring, but very, very practical, which benefited them a lot. They favor using assault mechs, and like to upgrade their lasers to heavy lasers. Living under them or as one of them is much more like real life. If you can do a job, you can have the job. Including a laborer wanting to be a warrior. Which ironically is the same approach that caused Clan Wolverine to be destroyed by Kerensky.
* Clan Steel Viper: Self righteous xenophobes who wanted to cooperate with the Inner Sphere but also treated freeborns like dirt, and then wondered why nobody liked them. Responsible for Clan genocide known as "The Wars of Reaving". [[Fail|Got genocided in return.]]
* Clan Widowmaker: The hyper-aggressive types. Their first Khan held a grudge against the Wolverines and framed them before being killed with support from Nicholas. Widowmaker later got annihilated for accidentally killing Nicky. What was left of it, however, <strike>gave birth</strike> (lies Clanners aren't born, they're grown) to the most dangerous MechWarrior ever, Natasha Kerensky.
* Clan Wolf: The spotlight stealing Clan, courtesy of it being Kerensky's personal clan. Split up into two factions following the Refusal War.
** Crusader Wolves: The guys who want to continue the invasion of Inner Sphere. Wound up migrating from their original invasion corridor to Lyran/Marik space & formed a new & dangerous upstart state called the '''Wolf Empire.''' Later <strike>[[Mary Sue|surprise surprise]]</strike>, won against the Republic and Jade Falcons on Terra to become the ilClan of the Third Star League [[FAIL|despite the other factions refusing to recognize them for now]] outside of the former Republic’s officials, Jade Falcons, & the Smoke Jaguars that are all a shadow of their strength. Naturally lost most of their forces to take the top prize.
** Warden Wolf-in-Exile: The guys who want to defend Inner Sphere against the rest of the clans, who they think are a mockery of Kerensky's teachings. Like the Kell Hounds, they got a massive "kill on sight" target painted on their back after the omnicidal Jade Falcon Khan got annoyed with their feisty resistance against her campaign into Lyran Territory. Somehow got convinced to rejoin the Crusaders Wolves in revenge against the Jade Falcons despite the story never addressing the Crusader-Warden divide on treating Inner Sphere nations as subjects to be conquered and ruled from above or charges to be protected and educated from partnership. The “official” motive of seeking payback against the Jade Falcons for razing their civilian population centers and killing their cadet academies can only go so far until the Green Chickens got defeated.
* <strike>[[Clan Wolverine]]</strike> Not-Named Clan: Aggressive and independent minded, these guys pissed off Nicky to such extent that they were annihilated after the vengeful Widowmaker Khan framed them of detonating nukes on civilians and another Clan’s genetic repository after the Wolverines seceded from the Clans. Basically, they did the caste thing but thought "Hey, why not let people do what they're best at?" and that sort of thing. It pissed off crazy pants ilKhan Kerensky because this approach made them more successful than all the other clans, proving his method was actually not the best way. Some survivors were able to flee as the '''Minnesota Tribe''' but they've been never heard from publicly since (though there are hints that they're around in the Deep Periphery in some recent novels and short stories). [[What|There are many theories about them returning to Inner Sphere and taking over it as shadow masterminds in order to destroy the clans.]]

===Wars of Reaving===
[[Advancing the Storyline|Fed up with having to write more stuff about clans nobody cares about]], a bunch of clans were wiped out after the Jihad, or driven out of clan territory. While the in-story explanation is that a butthurt ilKhan decided it was time to make a powerplay after not having won anything out of the Inner Sphere Invasion, everyone knows that there were several clans that had no discernable effect on the game.
*'''''Annihilated or Absorbed:'''''
**Blood Spirit: Got wiped out for using civilian militias which "isn't clan-like" and [[Bullshit|marked for annihilation for letting people fight for their homes instead of cooperating with their new leaders as Clan honor dictates.]] As well as using [[Planetary Defense Force|en-mass civilian militias]] to attack their enemies.
**Burrock: Tried to re-establish themselves after being absorbed, got defeated.
**Fire Mandrill: Too fractured to fight back effectively during the Wars of Reaving. What was left of them got absorbed by the Goliath Scorpions and other Homeworld Clans
**Ice Hellion: [[Fail|Killed themselves by trying to steal Jade Falcon and Hell's Horses territory.]] The remaining survivors joined Goliath Scorpion.
**Steel Viper: Took over the Clan Homeworlds and gave everyone free reign to remove the “taint” of the Invader Clans by any means necessary. Forgot that they themselves were an Invader Clan.
**Nova Cat: Destroyed by the Draconis Combine for being on the losing side of a civil war.
*'''''Exiled or Abjured:''''' These clans were forced out of the Clan Homeworlds on the pretense of being "corrupted" by Inner Sphere influences. Some later formed the '''Council of Six Clans''', representing the clans that now exist in the Inner Sphere.
**Ghost Bears: Banished to the Inner Sphere and eventually founded the '''Rasalhague Dominion.''' Joined the Council.
**Goliath Scorpion: Originally sided with the Homeworld Clans to drive the Invader Clans out of the Kerensky Cluster. Then was censured and abjured for absorbing Clan Ice Hellion Warriors and Star League descended mercenaries from Eridani Light Horse in their Clan eugenics program without permission. Ran away and conquered Nueva Castile and Umayyads (Spaniards vs. Arabs IN SPACE) in the Deep Periphery, forming '''Escorpion Imperio.''' By the eve of the Dark Age, they had also conquered their neighbors to the south, the Hanseatic League, and founded a new major Periphery power known as the '''Scorpion Empire''' that's second only to the Homeworld Clans as a military power in the Periphery.
**Hell's Horses: Stole some of Clan Wolf's territory in the Inner Sphere, and end up getting banished from the Clan Homeworlds. Developed a taste for experimenting with QuadVee Mechs (which can convert from a ground combat vehicle into a Quad Mech while also requiring a dedicated gunner). Joined the Council.
**Jade Falcon: Banished to the Inner Sphere and tried to conquer Terra but failed. Still rules the parts of the Inner Sphere they conquered during the Clan Invasion. Replaced the Smoke Jaguars as the most vicious clan under their latest Khan (who's willing to do anything to kill her enemies). Joined the Council. Later got most of their forces wiped out from omnicidal fighting against the Republic, Dragoons, and Wolves on Terra. Said genocidal Khan got killed off and replaced with a pragmatic reformer who agreed to follow the Wolf IlKhan in exchange for the Turquoise Turkeys becoming the IlKhan's body guards.
**Sea Fox/Diamond Shark: Ended up in what's left of the Free Worlds League. Split up into semi-independent merchant fleets and are now a collection of nomadic "Khanates" that sail the starlanes of the Inner Sphere. Joined the Council, but also joined the FWL as a member state. In the meantime, managed to bring the Sea Fox back from extinction, and changed back to their old name.
**Smoke Jaguar: Some of them showed up as super-secret Clanner loyalists called '''Fidelis''' to the Republic of the Sphere. More practical minded than their grandparents but just as likely to go [[rip and tear|berserk]] when fighting any clan warriors for their perceived betrayal. Still in the Fortress Republic. A scant few are found hiding in the Deep Periphery with the few warships that they still had. Later somehow let go of their grudge to pledge allegiance to the Wolve Khan in exchange for reforming their Clan under the IlKhan's protection.
**Snow Raven: Ran away and merged with the Outworlds Alliance in the Periphery, forming the '''Raven Alliance.''' Joined the Council.
**Spirit Cat: What's left of Nova Cats, allied with the Free Worlds League and formed an enclave in their territory with sponsorship from House Marik and Clan Sea Fox.
**Wolf: Splintered into several factions. Basically conquered the central and coreward territories of Lyran Alliance under the '''Wolf Empire.''' Making the Steiners have a bigger headache, their Khan, Katrina Steiner's descendant, claimed the mantle of Archon through her bloodline. Wolves-in-Exile refuse to join and are doing their own thing. Clan Wolf-Alliance joined the Council. “Katrina Steiner’s descendant” is in fact a Trueborn Clanner that Katherine Steiner-Davion had made using both her own genetic material and Victor Steiner-Davion’s, because regular incest just wasn’t crazy enough for her. Later became IlKhan <strike>naturally</strike>.
*'''''Home Clans:''''' Theses clans still hold territory in the Clan Homeworlds and consider themselves "True Clans."
**Cloud Cobra: Still around.
**Coyote: Sneaky bastards. Got their hands on the genetic material of one of Clan Wolves's founders. Outside of the universe, unreliable rumors hint that said founder may have been the last known descendant of House Cameron.
**Star Adder: TOP DOG. Their Khan was the one who stopped the psycho Steel Viper ilKhan by dint of beating his head inside out with the nearest handy blunt object.
**Stone Lions: Made from the Hell's Horses who were left in the Clan Homeworlds and didn't get exiled.

So basically there are now ten Clans: The six Spheroid Clans, and the four Home Clans. The rest are either dead, formed hybrid societies, or are even more minor than before and thus save the writers from some hard work in upcoming TROs.

==The Appeal of Battletech==
First and most obvious, giant stompy Battlemechs bristling with guns duking it out is cool. But despite that, Battletech is in general a more grounded and human setting. You don't have warp daemons, God Emperors, energy forces or psionic powers in Battletech or giant Space Cathedrals and machines that work better when people pray to them. Nor does it have artificial gravity, shields, sapient aliens, serious transhumanism, dyson spheres, general AI and other more wild science fiction ideas. While it does go into some suspense of belief in technology such as KF-FTL drive and HPG-FTL communications, most of the technology is still grounded within the realm of plausible belief. Society-wise, it doesn't go into the speculation on how civilization may come into conflict with divergent ideals or extraterrestrial life, instead you have human people like you and me struggling in a hostile universe where the most dangerous thing is often another human being under another flag. Not that the setting lacks for variety; the main factions are very well developed with their own distinct motivations, even if they do sometimes tend to lean into stereotypes. Battletech is for people who read [[Dune]] and find the idea of the Atreides, Harkonnens, Corinos and the other Great Houses of the Landsraad with their conflicts and their power plays to be far more interesting than what happened after Paul took over. Some others also consider it similar to a teen rated version of [[A Song of Ice and Fire|Game of Thrones]] in space (but with mechs and sci fi tactics in place of mythical creatures and gore).

Battletech is one of the more morally grey settings out there. Moreso than many Grimdark settings where it's a matter of nasty jerks vs literal demons. While there are a few factions which are better or worse than others on the whole ([[Magistracy of Canopus]] vs [[Clan Smoke Jaguar]]) all of the factions have their share of virtue and vice, heroes and villains. Good people can come up from the Nobility of the Federated Suns, Citizens of the Capellan Confederation or the Iron Wombs of The Clans, as can a lot real nasty bastards. In that regard, this is a rather tragic universe. In this universe nobody is corrupted by Chaos or seduced by the Dark Side. Instead humanity took to the stars and flourished, only to be brought low by the same human leaders with human failings.

As far as Mecha design goes, Battletech designs run the gamut from box-on-legs (Awesome, Dragon, etc), to egg-on-legs (Catapult, Marauder, etc), through to very polished designs (which were mostly stolen from Japanese anime shows). Wrong, they hired a third party artist who sold his designs to them and the other guys. Some of the later work, post-FASA, could be quite smooth, to the point of organic looking. As such, BattleTech is a pastiche of various art styles and design philosophies, covering the range of reactions from "cool-but-impractical", to "eh, practical-and-possible", and well out into the area that will make your engineering professor have a mental fit.

==Mechanics==
[[Image:Group-Plastic-Miniatures.jpg|thumb|right|The standard use of hexmaps renders the purchase of miniatures optional, though miniatures rules for the game are available.]]
[[Image:Blankrecordsheet.jpg|thumb|right|Record sheets are one of ''BattleTechs''' greatest blessings and curses.]]
The basic mechanic is simple. Two six-sided dice are used, with a to-hit (Equal or greater to) system. Initiative is interlaced, with the loser moving first and the winner able to react. All weapons damage is technically done at the same time, and therefore who shoots first is insignificant, although the order in which weapons fire from any given unit resolves is important. Larger weapons can scrub off large quantities of ablative armor, while smaller multi-hit weapons stand a better chance of forcing critical hits once a location is damaged. If you get hit, you mark off the weapons damage rating from your armor. If the shot penetrates your armor, you roll potential criticals. Firing weapons and moving about generates heat, which you must keep down to keep your 'Mech working properly.

Unlike games such as ''[[Warhammer]]'', where many units are either killed on the first shot or left unscathed, and little information is recorded, ''BattleTech'' uses record sheets to mark off each 'Mech's cumulative damage, ammunition, pilot status, and heat. Also, there are hit locations, so limbs can be blown off. The record sheets allow for effects that are more detailed, but this also increases the overall playtime. Although expert players can get through matches just as fast as players of other games of more or less equal size, new players often find that the game plays slowly. This is usually due to the time spent referencing hit-location tables, critical effects, etc. For new players, 2V2 matches are best, with 4V4 matches being the "cap", in order to have games that do not take excessively long. More experienced players can run games of 12v12 or larger in an afternoon, though these will often be multi-player games in which each ''player'' controls only a handful of 'Mechs.

One of the biggest appeals of ''BattleTech'' is that all of its units are made with a predefined set of rules. Custom designs are fully possible, though they are not likely to be welcome in tournament matches or pick-up games.

''BattleTech'' uses a build system based on 'Mech tonnage. You start with a Chassis limit, from 20-100 tons. You then determine engine size based on how fast you want your 'Mech to be (how many hexes you want it to be able to move per turn) you then allocate the remaining tonnage to control systems, weapons, ammo and armor. This method varies slightly depending on the technology of the chassis, but not overmuch. Though the system has recently been removed, there were previously three levels of technology.

'''Level 1''' (Now called "Introductory Tech") referred to early-era gameplay. Only the more rudimentary weapons and technologies are available, though the critical rules remain the same. This is the preferred level at which to learn, and is synonymous with the equipment available during the Succession Wars era. It is also the level of play made possible with starter boxes.

'''Level 2''' was Tournament-level gameplay. This introduced new equipment and electronics, as well as Clan technology (A more technologically advanced, but militant people). Though the rules are generally the same as those in level 1 gameplay, more-complicated equipment such as ECM, anti-missile systems, cluster munitions, etc. were better suited to more experienced players. It is the level of play made possible with separately-purchased rulebooks. Note that as the in-universe timeline advances, some more-advanced technology is designated "tournament-level", and several items that were Level 3 before the switch are also now "Tournament-Level".

'''Level 3''' referred to all advanced gameplay and equipment, including specialized gear from Historical manuals and the ''Solaris VII'' boxed sets/adventures. This has since been split out into "advanced", "experimental", and "era-specific" technology. This also included all equipment that was not listed in the core rulebooks. More complex rules were inserted in order to increase the realism and flexibility of the game. These include new weapons, new or altered terrain rules, artillery, alternate rules for major mechanics such as line-of-sight, etc. Though Level 3 rules included "prototype" equipment not printed in the core rulebooks, the standard rulebook in regards to Level 3 play was called ''Maxtech''. This has now been replaced by the Catalyst Games release of ''Tactical Operations'' and its sequels.

'''Advanced''' technology (not to be confused with "advanced rules" is covered largely in ''Tactical Operations'', and may be common but incorporates additional rules or restrictions that make it difficult to use without preparation.

'''Experimental''' tech is not mass-produced in-universe. The items are used in one-offs, prototype designs, and other weirdness. The ''Experimental Technical Readout'' series showcases this tech level, and most of the rules are in ''Tactical Operations'' or ''Strategic Operations''.

'''Era-specific''' technology incorporates advancements that were later abandoned in-verse. Usually these items were displaced by a superior version of the same technology, although there are some like the Listen-Kill missiles (which exploited a weakness in standard ECM protocols, later patched out) which are simply active for a few years and then abandoned once changing circumstances make them ineffective. Era-specific tech is the province of Historical sourcebooks, the ''Interstellar Operations'' rulebook, and a few campaign books.

==Spinoff Games==
Due to its popularity through the late 80s and early 90s, ''BattleTech'' spawned a multitude of spinoffs and expansion games.

'''[[Lost Worlds]]''' dueling books. NOVA adapted their melee dueling system to make four books for Battletech mecha. Each book has the opponent's view of the mech on each page, and a character sheet listing possible maneuvers. Since it used the same system as the rest of their books, you could have "20-ton Locust vs. skeleton with scimitar" duels.

'''Mechwarrior''' was a traditional pen-and-paper RPG set in the Battletech universe, using a ruleset similar to FASA's other hit RPG [[Shadowrun]]. It got second(1991) and third(1999) editions, then was later rebooted by Fanpro and Catalyst Games under the respective titles ''Classic Battletech RPG'' and '''Battletech: A Time of War''', likely to avoid conflation with WhizKids' ''Mechwarrior: Dark Age''. Also because by then the "Mechwarrior" title was fully associated with the video games.

'''AeroTech''' and '''BattleSpace''' were both games featuring Aerospace Fighters and DropShips/WarShips respectively, fighting in orbit before any of the action in the BattleTech game itself could begin. Both games eventually got absorbed into BattleTech's rules in the ''Total Warfare'' edition.

'''Battletroops''' was an infantry-scale game about the PBI who fight it out it in the shadow of Battlemechs. It later gained ''Clantroops'', an expansion pack that incorporated clan equipment as well as Battle Armor on both sides, but the game did not sell as well and the rules have since been abandoned.

'''Battleforce''' was a revision of '''BattleTech''', made in recognition of the fact that large-scale combat could not be effectively played out using the current system. Battleforce simplified each 'mech into a simple set of numbers, so that they could be clustered into units and fight over a much larger area. Battleforce 2, released about a decade later, also introduced planetary invasion maps and rules to go along with them. Although the maps are available in Map Compilation 2, the rules will be reprinted in the ''Strategic Operations'' and ''Interstellar Operations'' sourcebooks.

The '''Solaris VII Boxed set''' was made to simulate the fast-paced gladiatorial combat on the game's world of Solaris VII. It included new rules, new maps with special rules, new mechs, and supplements for roleplaying. Little known fact: some of the designs used in the original Solaris VII set were redesigns of the ''BattleTech'' 'mechs which were themselves copies of Japanese mechs! When the product tried to sell in Japan, half of the designs were already copyrighted by other well known anime companies, and the in-house designs were simply not "Japanese" enough for their tastes. Though the product itself flopped, its maps were reprinted and rereleased in 2004, as well as a complimentary up-to-date rulebook. Rules have since been standardized to match those of ''Classic Battletech'', but "Special Map rules" have been included.

The '''BattleTech Collectible Cardgame''' was produced by Wizards of the Coast in 1996, and ran until 1998. Though its popularity had begun to wane after the first core set, the release of the Pokemon card game was the nail in the coffin. The Battletech CCG hosted some very impressive artwork, though the game favored swarm-decks filled with plenty of weak, cheap 'mechs, and it's non-"Creature" cards were too weak to have an effective deck based around them. After five editions (''Battletech Limited''/''Unlimited'', ''Counterstrike'', ''Mercenaries'', ''Mechwarrior'', ''Arsenal'') Battletech CCG came out with ''Commander's Edition'', which picked some of the best cards of the last few editions (though it abandoned or revised some cards for inaccuracies or "brokenness") It had one final expansion, Crusade, which introduced the Steel Viper clan, though there were some prior cards that did reference the clan.

In July, 2013, Catalyst Game Labs released '''Alpha Strike''', a miniatures combat ruleset designed specifically to appeal to fans of Warhammer and Flames of War. It combined BattleForce statistics with improved miniatures rules. It's generally scoffed at by grognards but the only feasible way to play a regiment-sized battle in less than one lifetime.

==Video Games==
'''Official Games'''
* Crescent Hawk's Inception (Infocom, 1988)
* MechWarrior (Activision, 1989)
* Crescent Hawks' Revenge (Infocom, 1990)

* MechWarrior II (Activision, 1995)
* MechWarrior II: Mercernaries (Activision 1995)
** MechCommander (FASA, 1998)
* MechWarrior III (Microprose, 1999)
* MechWarrior IV: Vengeance (FASA/Microsoft, 2000), Black Knight (Microsoft, 2001), Mercenaries (Microsoft, 2002)
** These games had two expansions that gave more mechs, the Inner Sphere Mech Pack and Clan Mech Pack.
** MekTek released a legal port of Mercenaries, with both Mech Packs, new mechs, and battlesuits all inside, plus multiplayer support. Grab it from ModDB, abandonware sites, or your tracker of choice.
* Mechassault 1 (Day 1/Microsoft, 2002 for Xbox)
* Mechassault 2: Lone Wolf (Day 1/Microsoft, 2004 for Xbox)
* MechCommander II (FASA/Microsoft, 2001. The full game is offered by Microsoft for free [http://www.microsoft.com/en-ph/download/details.aspx?id=11457 here].)
* MechWarrior Online MMO (Smith & Tinker/Piranha Games, A F2P game first released on 2012 and currently out as a full product on Steam.)
* MechWarrior Tactical Command (Personae Studios, 2012?, [[Fail|for iPhone/iPad]]. After some uncertainty, MTC was fully released in the iTunes store. Too bad it sucks.)
* BattleTech (Harebrained Schemes, 2018) - funded through Kickstarter and headed up by Jordan Weisman)
** Turn-based strategy game, similar to the original tabletop game. Takes place during the Succession Wars, in a formerly empty area of the Periphery.
*MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries: (Piranha Games, 2019). Also takes place during the Succession Wars. Because nobody wants to take the time to portray the cluster fuck that is the Blake Jihad properly.

'''Unlicensed Games'''
* [http://www.mechlivinglegends.net Mechwarrior Living Legends] (Wandering Samurai/Clan Jade Wolf, 2011)

'''The following are free, homemade versions of Battletech:'''
* MechWar v1.12 (MS-DOS)
* [http://megamek.info/ MegaMek] (Java)
* BTMUX - ASCII-only MMO (anyone old enough to remember what a MUD is?) (any OS) You could play it in pure ASCII, or get [http://bt-thud.sourceforge.net/thud/ a graphical helper] Most of the existing ones are gone, but [http://frontiermux.com/news.php FrontierMUX] seems to still be alive.
* <strike>[http://neveron.com/ Neveron] (web-based mmo)</strike> [Taken offline on July 31st 2014]
* [http://www.titansofsteel.de/ Titans of Steel] (MS-Windows)

==Current State==
[[File:Never give up.jpg|thumb|right|250px|Little Urbie, the greatest of us all.]]
As of 2022, Battletech is in the best state it's been in a long time. After sitting on the property for close to a decade without doing anything, Catalyst has used Kickstarter to fund a series of plastic mech sculpts. Lots of this was enabled by finally resolving the legal dispute with Harmony Gold on the Unseen, but the end result is that, for the first time ever, a wide range of high quality plastic mech miniatures are legitimately available. There's a "dip your toe" style starter kit with the Beginner Box, the true starter kit in Battletech: A Game of Armored Combat, and another for the clans with Clan Invasion. Beyond those, there's a total of twenty different "Force Packs" available, each having 4-6 mechs centered on a theme of some sort. Since you only need about one Force Pack's worth of mechs to play at all, ease of starting the game is definitely one of Battletech's major virtues now.

===MechWarrior Online===
[http://mwomercs.com/ Mechwarrior Online] has, as of this writing, been running for a decade and only now showing signs of slowing down. A competitive sim-shooter, Mechwarrior Online has probably been a commercial success and helped get at least some people into the hobby, but its main virtue was as a source of redesigned mechs. 3D prints of models from MWO are easily found on Etsy, providing modern looks for mechs that CGL hasn't gotten around to resculpting yet.

===Battletech 2018===
Harebrained Schemes announced their return to Kickstarter in fall 2015 in order to fund [http://battletechgame.com/ Battletech], a turn based tactics game featuring RPG mechanics for Mechs and MechWarriors. The final result was a very respectable strategy game - you play as a mercenary company commander in the year 3025, starting with a patchy collection of low grade mechs and keeping your aging DropShip from falling apart around you. Gameplay is fairly close to the tabletop but not an exact recreation. The campaign follows a power struggle for control of the Aurigan Reach, a region of mostly unimportant space at the rimward end of the map, between the Magistracy of Canopus and the Taurian Concordat. The game was followed up by three DLCs - Flashpoint, which added a series of mini-campaigns of 2-3 missions each, most of them tying into Battletech canon, Urban Warfare, which naturally added urban environments, and Heavy Metal, which added more mechs and a series of flashpoint campaigns surrounding the crash-site of a lost Star League era JumpShip with [[Clan Wolverine|obscured origins]]. Overall, Battletech 2018 is probably the standout Battletech game of the 2010s and a great strategy game in its own right.

Several fan-made mod packs (notably [https://www.nexusmods.com/battletech/mods/79/ RogueTech] and [https://www.nexusmods.com/battletech/mods/452/ BattleTech Advanced 3062]) have been produced which significantly extend the life of the vanilla game. These mods introduce many new factions, dozens of new 'Mechs and tanks, hundreds of new pieces of 'Mech equipment, a far larger star-map sandbox to play in, and far more depth to the 'Mech customization system as well as many quality of life changes. RogueTech in particular attempts to bring the game more in line with the tabletop experience and offers a much higher degree of gameplay complexity compared to vanilla Battletech.

===Mercenaries 5===
Oof. Well, they gave it a shot. After over a decade since the last Mechwarrior game, Mechwarrior 5 was released and it was...kind of a flop. Repetitive missions and buggy AI were the primary issues, and the post-launch DLCs and bug fixes only did so much to help. As of this writing, mod support has been added, so the fans might make MW5 worth it at some point...but for now, don't bother.

==The Tetatae (Skub Tribal Jungle Chickens)==

There is only 1 known sapient Xenos race in the BattleTech setting. The Tetatae are tribal bird people armed with spears who inhabit a Jungle World. They show up in a far-off world in uncharted space populated with some stranded humans from the Draconis Combine. The inclusion of sapient species was such a [[Rage|controversial]] [[Fail|action]] that the novel introducing them, Far Country, was promptly ignored by both the lore developers and fans ever since it came out.

According to the author the book was suppose to be the first of a canned series of books linked to a also reduced in scale tabletop expansion/campaign pack that would had dealt with the attempt to find the Clan Home-worlds by Comstar's Explorer Corps's (something started in the wake of a few events in the backstory to try to find the SLDF exiles only to end up ironically causing the clans to invade when one of their ship stumbles on the Smoke Jaguar's home system) that would had included potential alien encounters in their searches, instead of the full on expansion/campaign they decided to scale it into a source book minus alien encounters.

(Should be noted that this story was properly retconned. Far Country is an In-universe TV show. The same way the Battletech TV show is just a in-universe production).

==External links==
*[http://megamek.sf.net Play through the tubes with MegaMek]
*[http://www.sarna.net Battletech Wiki that holds much information about the universe]
*[http://bgb.booru.org/index.php Blue Gunner Booru, a /btg/-maintained taggable gallery of BT and related art. Perpetually in-progress.]
[[Category:Wargames]][[Category:Skirmish-Level Wargames]][[Category:BattleTech]]

==Gallery==
<center>
<gallery>
File:Glorious_3d_Terrain.JPG|Glorious 3d terrain
File:More_Glorious_3d_Terrain.JPG|More glorious 3d terrain
File:Infantry_Strike_From_Behind_As_The_Kuritian_Lance_Takes_On_4_Steiner_Mechs_And_6_Tanks.JPG|Infantry strike from behind as the Kuritan lance takes on 4 Steiner mechs and 6 tanks
File:Kuritians_Advancing.JPG|Kuritans advancing
File:Surrounded.JPG|Kick party
File:Eridani_Light_Horses_MechWarrior.png|Bad mofo
File:You're_awesome.jpg
File:Dougram_and_shadowhawk_comparison.png|The original anime mecha Dougram (left) compared to the original "unseen" Shadowhawk (center) and the modern Shadowhawk (right), a robot so badass it transcends cultures and 4chan boards
</gallery>
</center>

==Factions Portal==
{{Battletech Factions}}
[[Category: BattleTech]]

==/tg/ Battletech Creations==
*[[Velatine Federal Republic]]
*[[/tg/ Homebrew Mech Designs]]
*[[Sunbats mercenary company]]
*[[/btg/ Harebrained Battalion II]]