BattleTech Gothic: First Impressions

As a long-time (literally thirty years) fan of BattleTech, it's been amazing watching a game that I saw almost wither up and die back in the day go through an unparalleled renaissance. For the longest time, BT was a hair away from vaporware, with game stores in the mid/late-00s often not even carrying it, because they thought it was dead. So now, after multiple record-breaking Kickstarters and brand awareness increased to the point that I can find BattleTech products in freaking Target or Barnes and Noble, it's amazing to see the game start branching out into the new ground that the BattleTech Continuum represents.

On the off chance you're reading this without having heard of it, the BattleTech Continuum is a new series of box sets from Catalyst Game Labs, each looking to put a new spin on the game by incorporating new aesthetics and genres. The first of these, BattleTech Gothic, was announced earlier this year to no small amount of furor in the fandom, both positive and negative.

The kind folks at CGL were nice enough to hook me up with a shiny new copy of the Gothic box set in advance of its release later this month (August 15th, international shipping and tariffs and other such nonsense willing), and I was all too eager to sink my teeth into its meaty deliciousness as soon as it arrived.

While there have been some fantastic looks at this box set from other games writers, particularly the beginner-friendly deep dive from Jack Hunter at Goonhammer, I haven't seen a lot of conversation about the particulars of it from long-time veterans in the fandom. So here are my first impressions, after having had a few weeks to play around with everything!

The Box Itself

There's no two ways about it, this box set is a wonderful product! The production quality is impeccable, with the same level of product grade, detail, and clean design as the Mercs and Alpha Strike boxes. Speaking as someone who got into the game through the 1996 4th Edition box, BT really has come a long way.

I'll go into the specifics on the contents later this week, but in a general sense, everything you could possibly need to get your Gothic on is right here. The rulebook and universe overview book are high-quality printings, the card-stock punchouts for terrain and units are nice and sturdy and have gorgeous color, the dry-erase-friendly record sheets/Alpha Strike cards/Battlefield Support cards are all great, and the minis themselves are absolutely this box's selling point. Eight of the most recognizable 'Mechs in BT, but covered in greebles and spikes and buttresses all worthy of the name Gothic? If nothing else, bandit kingdom and pirate players are going to eat them up with a spoon.

The Gothic Setting

Gothic's timeline presents a course of events that is both very similar and wildly different from the main timeline. It diverges surprisingly early on by introducing Abominations, gene-spliced monsters used as weapons of war and terror, early on in the Age of War, even before BattleMechs – yet this major shift in the technological status quo doesn't have much of an impact on the overall course of events. Everything is a fair amount more grimdark aesthetically, but the Great Houses are still there, the Star League still happened and fell apart thanks to Stefan Amaris, and Aleksandr Kerensky still headed off into the great unknown in the galaxy's biggest-ever "if you guys aren't gonna be nice to me, I'm taking my ball and going home" moment.

The box set covers the timeline up until 3015, setting up a grimdarkified version of the Third Succession War status quo that long-time players will be plenty familiar with – the Great Houses are in a state of détente and technical decline after almost two and a half centuries of endless war, but things are clearly on the edge of getting a lot worse. The differences mostly lie in how much more horrible a person everyone is; each of the Realms is blatantly xenophobic and even more authoritarian than their prime-timeline counterparts, with the Steiners in particular being noted as suffering under the heel of an Archon who herself is under the sway of the zealous EisenKirche ("Iron Church" in rough German), a religious movement obsessed with reclaiming and redeeming the wayward souls of the other Realms.

I want to be clear that I'm saying this with a joyful enthusiasm: I can’t stand the Gothic setting. It takes the worst tendencies of BattleTech’s innately authoritarian perspective and turns them up to 11. I'll go into more detail about my feelings on the matter in an upcoming post, because I don't want my philosophical musings to immediately detract from the fact that I think this is a fantastic box set for BattleTech fans both new and old. The abominations are pretty fun aesthetically though, and could be hacked to represent the numerous hostile megafauna in the main BattleTech timeline (and by "could" I mean "I'm already working on those rules myself"). And there are a few great Easter eggs in the fluff, particularly the pilot cards, that imply maybe the setting isn't quite as grim as the aesthetic implies.

My Semi-Final Thoughts

Later this week I'll be posting a piece-by-piece look at the contents of the Gothic box and how they may or may not be relevant to long-time fans; beginners will absolutely get a good amount of mileage out of it for sure. I'll also, as I said, take a look at some of the concerns I've seen flare up in the fandom – both real and imagined – and how Gothic does and doesn't hit the mark. It's a precarious time to be a BattleTech fan, after all, with right-wing nutjobs lurking in the darker corners of the internet, just waiting to start drama and discourse because of their real-life inadequacies that for some reason don't go away when they paint Nazi iconography on their miniatures, and if Catalyst Game Labs (and the fandom as a whole) want to move beyond the whims of armchair fascists, there are some hard conversations to be had about BattleTech's makeup – conversations that Gothic inadvertently makes all the more topical.

All discourse aside, though, Gothic is a great BattleTech product from start to finish. The buzz from GenCon last weekend makes it clear that the con attendees thought so too, with boxes flying off the shelves apparently faster than CGL staff could restock them. It's got me all the more excited for the next Continuum box set, Rockets and Rayguns - at least, so long as it follows through on the concept art teased in the Gothic trailer and gives me a BattleMaster with a big ol' Tesla coil for a gun!