Nightmare Fuel / BattleTech

Death from Above.

BattleTech may not have the grim darkness of Warhammer 40,000, but that doesn't mean it's a slouch when it comes to terror on the tabletop.

ComStar

• While ComStar was a neutral (to the public), quasi-religious order dedicated to preserving knowledge and the means of faster-than-light communication, they were also manipulative bastards that manipulated the other factions for their own ends in ways that would make the Illuminati blush with jealousy.
  • One particularly egregious skeleton in their closet was the "Black December Incident" where ROM agents blew up the Chunnel (yes, that one), killing thousands of innocent lives and pinning the blame on a resistance group known as Black December. All so they can look like the heroes in their occupation of Terra. And it worked.
  • They struck again in 3027, when they discovered a secret Star League bunker on Sirius V, then occupied by the Grey Death Legion mercenary group. Wanting to destroy the now legendary Helm Memory Core inside to prevent anyone else from having it, Comstar Precentor Emilio Rachan ordered ROM agents disguised as Gray Death soldiers to destroy the city of Tiantan by bombing its habitat dome. Seventeen million people died because Comstar didn't feel like sharing. The Grey Death Legion got the last laugh, however. They recovered the memory core first, then shared it with as many factions as they could find, triggering a technological renaissance unheard of until the aftermath of the Clan Invasion.
  • Operation Holy Shroud can easily be argued as the worst thing Comstar has ever done. During the technological decline of the Inner Sphere during the First and Second Succession Wars, the attempts made by the Successor States to keep themselves from falling into the Stone Age was seen as a threat to Comstar's technological dominance over the other factions. Determined to keep Comstar as the most advanced faction as part of their "divine right" to all technical information, Primus Raymond Karpov ordered ROM to assassinate three-hundred of the Inner Sphere's most brilliant minds and innovators before pinning the blame on the conflict between each of the five states. This backfired when their deaths convinced the Successor States to agree to a ceasefire...only to be plunged into the Third Succession War soon after when Lyran traders were given confidential information about the Draconis Combine's "Shadow War" and the Draconis Combine receiving word about said traders trying to muscle in on Combine markets. The person who provided both of those leaks? Raymond Karpov.
  • The reason why Comstar resorts to such terroristic behavior is because of a "prophecy" supposedly made by their founder, Jerome Blake, that states that when the great houses of the Inner Sphere have destroyed each other in their constant wars of attrition, Comstar will survive and become the saviors and leaders of humanity. With such an apocalyptic set of beliefs and a near-unrivaled pool of resources at their disposal, the Word of Blake's inevitable "Jihad" was just that: inevitable.

The Periphery

• The back of beyond of known space, the Periphery (and its cousin, the Deep Periphery), is for the most part a lawless backwater where brute force and savagery rules the day. Unless you're traveling inside states like the Homeworld Clans, the Taurian Concordat or the Magistracy of Canopus, expect to find only nascent nations, bandit kingdoms and pirate havens.
• While the Periphery was always seen as the fringes of human civilization that was constantly bullied by the Star League, it still had an air of legitimacy thanks to the Rim Worlds Republic. Which all came crashing down when an ambitious leader named Stefan Amaris usurped Richard Cameron's rule of the Star League, renaming it the Amaris Empire and plunging the Inner Sphere into a bloody civil war that is still felt centuries later. Once the dust had cleared and the Rim Worlds Republic devolved into a cluster of warring bandit kingdoms, the Periphery in its entirety was forever seen as a lawless backwater home to the worst aspects of human nature. A reputation that, in spite of the education system of the Taurian Concordat and the progressive human rights policies of the Magistracy of Canopus, would never recover. The arrival of the Clans from the Deep Periphery would be the final nail in the coffin for whatever scrap of dignity or legitimacy the Periphery states still held.
• Because of their longstanding hostilities with the Federated Suns, the Taurian Concordat hates all things relating to House Davion with a burning passion. Invasion drills are regular, policies have been enacted simply to spite the Federated Suns and Davions are demonized so thoroughly in Concordat society that they're depicted as hypocritical villains even in their online games.
  • Nowhere is this resentment more apparent than Protector Thomas Calderon, whose mental health began to rapidly circle the drain after his eldest son was killed in a dropship accident. Before long, he became outrageously paranoid, believing that even the smallest misfortune or problem was somehow the sign of an imminent attack from the Federated Suns. From then and there, his efforts to build up the Concordat's defenses against invasion caused a massive shortfall in construction materials and resources, forcing one of his greatest benefactors to resort to embezzlement and subsequently triggering a scandal that almost killed off his nation's plans to have proper armor technology.
• The Circinus Federation is a full-blown rogue nation, founded by pirates and refugees from the Amaris Civil War. The nation is hopelessly corrupt, with a government that can only be described as "predatory" whose only activities are acts of piracy against neighboring factions and playing dumb about it. After striking a deal with the Word of Blake, they agreed to shelter Thomas Marik and had their entire capital planet of Circinus scoured clean from orbit.
• The Marian Hegemony is a Periphery state modelled after the ancient Roman Empire and, in spite of their status as a recognized nation, are hated by nearly every other faction for their incessant acts of piracy. What makes them especially reviled however, is their unabashed practice of slavery.
• The short story, Back End of Nowhere, shows just how devastating even a light Battlemech can be to a rural community. An entire village on Randall's Regret was ruined after a lone pirate in a ramshackle Urbanmech made off with whatever the oversized hammock strapped on its back could carry. Neighbors and family members? Dead. A house built by the effort of two families? Destroyed. A barn that was the "dropship" for countless childhood games? Flattened. A hastily assembled militia trying to stop the pirate? Blown up with a couple cheap shots. One desperate farmer took to piloting a modified Cattlemaster to try and take down the pirate that destroyed the only home he ever knew and loved in a valiant, last-ditch effort. Cut to the pirate roasting a pig over an open fire, counting his money as he remembered how the yokel in the Cattlemaster almost killed him.
• As of 3151, the ruler of the Magistracy of Canopus is Majestrix Ilsa Centrella, known for her impressive beauty, intelligence and political acumen. What she is most known for, however, is the fact that she produced an heir with her brother.
• The Rim Worlds Republic, home of the infamous Stefan Amaris, was founded by a man as evil as the one who ended both the Republic and the Star League: Hector Worthington Rowe. A man who gladly organized show trials, tortured prisoners to death, murdered the survivors of his attacks and founded a social class made up entirely of the people he enslaved. He's not very nice.

Age of War

• Ever wondered why war became a way of life in the Battletech universe? And why it became such a crapsack universe in the first place? Blame Stefan Amaris, whose long-planned coup d'etat officially began after he murdered Richard Cameron and renamed the Star League as the "Amaris Empire," ordering the execution of every man, woman and child with even a drop of Cameron blood in them, imprisoning his political rivals in internment camps and committing widescale voter fraud. Everything that followed, from the centuries of war that nearly drove humanity back to the Stone Age, to the SLDF's self-exile out of disgust for the behavior of the successor states that would lead to the formation of the Clans, to the Periphery becoming a lawless backwater, to Jerome Blake's establishment of Comstar in an effort to preserve mankind's knowledge in spite of the bloodshed, to the Jihad that would come from Blake's most fanatical believers, is all Stefan's fault.
• In the earliest days of interstellar conflict, rules of engagement were practically non-existent if not incredibly vague. Entire nations poured all of their resources into the construction of warships that, thanks to a lack of FTL communications, could nuke enemy targets into oblivion and then jump out of the system before any retaliation could come to pass. This total war policy came to a head at the Tintavel Massacre, where the conflict between the Free Worlds League and the Capellan Confederation degenerated to the point where both sides nuked each others' strategic sites until the entire planet became uninhabitable. To prevent such mass destruction from becoming routine, all major powers signed the Ares Convention, which laid down strict rules of engagement and penalties for war crimes. As the coming centuries would prove, the Ares Convention was seen as more of a friendly suggestion than a law.
  • Worse - as the United Hindu Collective fears, the Ares Conventions made warfare "legitimate" in that it now had rules. The Terran Hegemony used their status as "observers" to spy on the miltiaries of the Great Houses. The Capellan Confederation and the Federated Suns would beat up the Tauran Concordat with nukes and weapons of mass destruction because "they didn't sign the Ares Conventions".
• The Santiago Massacre of 2572 began when the peaceful protests against the Draconis Combine's occupation of the titular Outworlds Alliance planet turned violent, leaving twenty-seven civilians dead and escalating tensions that inevitably led to the Reunification War. The incident that triggered the riots is much, much uglier, however. A mob of children showed their support of the protests by throwing snowballs at Kuritan Mechwarriors - one of whom became so enraged by this slight that he threw mech coolant in a child's FACE. Yes, you read that correctly.
• While the Ares Convention greatly reduced the scale and prevalence of warfare in the Inner Sphere, allowing trade and technological development to blossom, the Terran Hegemony knew that this would not last. A company called Skobel Mechworks used the invention of myomer fiber and neurohelmets to develop industrial exoskeletons. Director-General Jacob Cameron, desperate to win back the crowd after becoming violently hated by the people of the Terran Hegemony, looked to this new technology and in it saw massive political potential. By pooling the research, resources and efforts of twenty mega-corporations, Cameron developed a bipedal, 100-ton war machine dubbed the "Mackie", which swept the floor with five remote-control tanks during its initial test-run. It was a resounding success and both the Mackie and its developmental descendants would change warfare forever, known as BattleMechs.
  • The Terran Hegemony's first BattleMech engagement with House Kurita had a lance - four Mackies - utterly trounce a DCMS tank company. The Hegemony forces left some survivors just so they would spread the word of what happened. The result was that ALL of the powers in the Inner Sphere raced to steal the design of the Mackie and spark a Lensman Arms Race in a panic.

The Succession Wars

• After the disbanding of the first Star League, all Inner Sphere powers were hellbent on reestablishing it in their image. What ensued were centuries of total war and attrition that saw factories, research centers and even civilian population centers as targets to get an edge over their opponents, resulting in a slow and steady decline in technology until there was a very, very real threat of regressing to the industrial age at best.
• In terms of sheer destruction, the Succession Wars were more devastating to humanity than all other wars fought by humanity, combined, both up to that point and further on in the timeline. To put it in perspective, the Reunification War, which devastated the Periphery, killed approximately 100 million people in the Periphery realms through direct attacks on civilians, starvation, and destruction of homes and infrastructure. The Amaris Civil War killed roughly 150 million people, most of them civilians in the the Terran Hegemony, through the same means. By the standards of the First Succession War alone, those death tolls would be considered rounding errors. While it is impossible to tell the exact death toll, entire planets of billions were left all but depopulated, and estimates by adding them all together get in the double- to triple-digit billion range of casualties.
• The Battle of Ingelsmond, which took place between 2787-2789 in the First Succession War. A rich former Terran Hegemony world, Ingelsmond was besieged by the Draconis Combine, who sought to take the planet for its own. Not wanting to join the Combine, Ingelsmond sent out missives to the Federated Suns and the Lyran Commonwealth, offering to willingly join either if they would repulse the Dragon. While neither realm could muster the strength to liberate it, both saw the value in denying it to House Kurita and promptly launched raids to destroy Ingelsmond's infrastructure. The people of Ingelsmond could only watch in horror as the people they had asked to liberate them instead arrived to nuke their planet, and House Kurita responded in kind by unleashing their own nuclear stockpile on both FedSuns, Lyrans, and Ingelsmond itself. Eleven gigatons worth of nuclear weapons were used during the two-year conflict^note as of 2020, most ICBMs used by modern-day nuclear powers carry warheads in the 100 kiloton - 1 megaton range, meaning a significant fraction of Earth's entire nuclear arsenal was used on Ingelsmond, reducing a pre-war population of over 4.2 billion humans to around a million and reducing all major settlements to rubble. After the Combine declared victory by default and withdrew in 2789, what few survivors were left emerged out of hiding and managed to rebuild a tentative new civilization... Until 2803, when they were rediscovered by House Kurita and promptly nuked back into oblivion. By 2822, ComStar declared Ingelsmond "uninhabited" and had it taken off the starmaps entirely. That the Battle of Ingelsmond, unlike the Kentares Massacre, is neither remembered, nor considered unusual or excessive for its time, pretty much says it all concerning the climate of the early Succession Wars.
• The Kentares Massacre of 2796, "the single largest war crime in human history". After House Kurita troops landed on and captured Kentares IV, some stay-behind Davion troops were still operating, including a Davion sniper who took a shot at what he thought was a high-ranking Kurita officer who had decided to take a walk outside his Battlemaster. His shot killed the officer, who turned out to be high-ranking, all right. He was Minoru Kurita, the Coordinator of the Draconis Combine. The problem was, 93-year-old Minoru was the only thing standing between his insane son, Jinjiro, and the rulership of the Combine. Almost as soon as Jinjiro heard the news, he replied with a three-word command: "Kill them all." A general who dared to ask for clarification on what "them" meant was summarily executed on the spot. From that point on, it was clear: Kentares IV must die. At first the massacres were organized with firing squads, but Jinjiro (who had relocated to the planet so he could personally witness the executions for fun) decided that the killings weren't painful and sadistic enough and so he demanded that the troops start using katanas. In the span of 152 days, over 90 percent of the planet's population were killed, over fifty-two million people in total, a single-incident death toll that would manage to stand as a grim record even through the horror days of the Jihad. The scope and brutality of the murders were so horrific, that DCMS troops began to revolt, some sheltering Kentarans, other even leaking footage of the murders to the wider Sphere. Some of them were so traumatized by the horrors they were forced to inflict that they turned to seppuku as the only means to their redemption.
• A philosophical movement snuffed out by the Succession Wars was that of the Pan-Humanists, who believed that all of humanity shared a common path, goal and future that could be achieved through diplomacy philanthropic pursuits like a non-violent version of the Star League. Tragically, the Capellan Confederation apparently took them as a threat to national security and ordered a false flag attack on their headquarters in 3020, leading to the death of fifty-thousand people at most. In an added, bitter twist of irony, this all took place on a planet called "Truth."

The Clans

• When the Succession Wars took off, the general of the Star League Defense Forces, Aleksandr Kerensky, lost all faith in the Inner Sphere and led an exodus of almost the entire SLDF to the Deep Periphery. While Aleksandr intended to preserve the good of the Star League in exile, he died not long after in the midst of small-scale recreation of the Succession Wars, and his son Nicholas took over to restart human civilization anew. This time in his image: where martial prowess determined rank, where warriors called all the shots and where their best and brightest would be the basis of a eugenics program to create the greatest fighters that humanity will ever know. And thus, were born the Clans.
• For three hundred years, the Successor States were in a technological freefall while the Clans, who left long before the Succession Wars, fled with a treasure trove of technical data that would later become extinct in the Inner Sphere, expanding and improving upon it during their so-called "Golden Century." By the time of the Clan Invasion (known to the invaders as Operation Revival), they had developed harjel, Elemental battle armor, Omnimechs and improved versions of either scarce or forgotten Inner Sphere technology. The Clans were so advanced in fact, that in the earliest days of the invasions, many people in the Inner Sphere were convinced that they were under attack by aliens.
• The Lyran Alliance had a religion known as the One Star Faith that believed in a paradise world guarded by Kerensky's descendants. Let's just say that they were in for a very rude awakening when the Clans showed up.
• Don't be fooled by the Honor Before Reason mentality of the Clans; they can be just as brutal as any other player in the scene. Just ask Clan Smoke Jaguar, infamous for a variety of war crimes thanks to their complete disregard for anything not military. When dealing with an insurgency on a planet they conquered, their solution involved holding entire blocks of civilian apartments hostage and demanding the perpetrators show themselves... and when no perpetrator showed the first couple of times, they simply destroyed the apartments, killing the men, women, and children inside with no hesitation or reticence, only stopping when a clearly innocent monk claimed responsibility in order to make them stop destroying apartments. This ultimately culminated in their decision to handle the unruly city by bombarding it from space with a Warship; the novels make explicit mention of the nearby river being boiled away to nothing and that the destruction was so complete that the city of Edo simply ceased to exist as anything other than a hundred-meter-deep crater.
  • The origins of Clan Smoke Jaguar are nightmare fuel in and of itself. Franklin Osis, a warrior resentful of humanity's inherently violent nature, tried to recover from his combat trauma by admiring the wildlife of Strana Mechty with his brother Simon - only to have it shattered when a Smoke Jaguar leapt out of nowhere and tore Simon's throat out in front of him. Crazed with fear, Franklin threw himself at the beast with only a hunting knife and slaughtered the beast...only to discover that, not only did he return to his violent past, he loved it.
  • During Operation Klondike, Clan Smoke Jaguar's fondness for torturing and raping the locals caught up to them when the city of Kaliningrad took up arms against them after an unspecified "incident" involving a Jaguar warrior. Franklin Osis declared the entire city to be "enemy combatants" and razed every last building to the ground, refusing to help the now homeless survivors. His only comment on the matter was "They should have surrendered after the first lesson." While ilKhan Kerensky was understandably furious, Osis has become such a monster from his Clan's trademark bloodlust that he went as far as to nickname them "the Destroyers of Kaliningrad."
  • Even living as a civilian under Clan Smoke Jaguar sucks. Their buildings are function over form, entertainment is limited because of communication restrictions and their prejudice towards Freeborn humans, while par for the course for Clan society, is less "sneering pity" and more "seething hatred." While Freeborn warriors that succeed in their Trials of Position into the Clan Touman will win their peers' begrudging respect, the Smoke Jaguars will be so indignant over their victory that they will force them to take a second trial just to prove a point of how much they hate anyone outside their eugenics program.
• Despite their frightening name, Clan Hell's Horses is one of the nicer Clans, known for their greater tolerance of Freeborn warriors and "Man-Before-Machine" set of beliefs. However, their eponymous totem animal, engineered to survive the highlands of Circe, is anything but friendly. In fact, the Hell's Horse is carnivorous, violent and impossible to domesticate. The Clans have been around since the 2800s, have developed an interstellar society where Might Makes Right and not a single one of them has ever tamed a Hell's Horse.
• The wrath of the Clans extends to their own as well.
  • No more is this more apparent than the fate of Clan Wolverine, which was systematically slaughtered down to the last man, woman and child after being falsely accused by Clan Widowmaker of detonating a nuclear device in the city of Great Hope. Clan Wolverine became so hated by the other Clans that all records of its existence were struck from official Clan records and known from that point on as the "Not-Named Clan." The few survivors of this genocide escaped to the Deep Periphery as the mysterious "Minnesota Tribe." No other Clan - not even the criminally-inclined Clan Burrock - ever got such shabby treatment.
  • And the novel Betrayal of Ideals makes this even more horrific by showing that the Wolverines really didn't have it coming. Rather, Nicholas quickly realized that a warrior society needs enemies to fight, and with Operation KLONDIKE being a resounding success, they were now in peacetime. When Nicholas saw that other Clans were arraying against the Wolverines, he was perfectly content to let them be the enemy to unite the Clans against. The horrific story of The Not-Named Clan as soulless monsters burning everything down just to watch the glow was created after the fact by Nicholas, revising Clan history into a story to keep his artificial society together exactly the way he wanted it.
• Clan Goliath Scorpion has a...unique method of locating lost Star League caches and facilities, relying on visions induced by a hallucinogen made from their totem's deadly venom. This "Necrosia" is frequently used as a combat drug to calm the mind and sharpen the senses during battle. Sometimes it drives its user into an Unstoppable Rage that precedes a fatal coma, but life is full of trade-offs.
• While police brutality is universally condemned in the real world, in Clan society it's the norm. Many if not all of a Clan's civilian police forces are Warrior Caste dropouts that failed their training or Freeborn that ended up as the victim of Clan society's prejudice against those born the old-fashioned way. And they are more than willing to take their anger and frustration out on criminals and protesters. The Clans also happen to be big fans of corporal punishment, carrying out public whippings and floggings for crimes ranging from simple theft to sexual assault.
  • An added twist to this becomes apparent when one looks at the Clan economy. The Clans have a currency known as the Kerensky that's used for transactions between Clans (the Clan economy is otherwise moneyless, with warriors able to requisition goods they want and members of the lower castes paid in work credits). It's largely electronic, but small gold coins and bricks are also used on occasion. However, there's a thriving black market largely centered in Strana Mechty's capital of Katyusha City, and it relies on physical Kerenskies for those transactions. As a result, if you're caught with so much as a single Kerensky on your person and you're not a part of the merchant caste, the Clan Military Police assume you're a black market racketeer and punish you as such (the punishment is a two-step reduction in grade - thus hurting your livelihood - and a public flogging). Just think about how easily an expert at sleight of hand could set up an innocent person for that punishment just by slipping a coin about the size of an American penny into their pocket...
• First developed by Clan Smoke Jaguar to save on limited resources, "Protomechs" are the intermediary units between Elemental battle armor and Battlemechs. On the outside, they are designed to resemble beasts or mythical creatures to scare the opposition. On the inside, their pilots are so deeply wired into the machine that they feel like the machine itself is their own body - sometimes to the point where they believe it really is their own body. This manifests as everything from a god complex even outside their machines to feeling the pain if one of their protomech's limbs is severed while they're plugged into it (and since they're situated in the protomech's torso rather than the head, one wonders what happens to them when a protomech's head is severed...)
  • Because of their inhuman locomotion, quadripedal Protomechs have proven difficult to control. That is, until the Society produced a drug known as "Feralize": an addictive chemical that turns the user's mind into that of a rabid animal. Given the Society's unique interpretation of medical ethics, the clinical trials that went into such a drug are probably best left to the imagination.
• The Genecaste are the collective Mad Woman In The Attic of Clan society. Rarely spoken aloud or in company, the Genecaste are those who took the Clans' transhumanist ideology a little too far. Living in isolated communes for fear of extermination, the Genecaste are able to survive in low-gravity, high-gravity or underwater environments. Some have even gained the ability to survive in outer space. Depending on the degree of their mutations, they may resemble Rubber-Forehead Aliens, animal people, or even something straight out of All Tomorrows. Considering how little is known of the Deep Periphery, there may be an entire empire of Genecaste out there, waiting to be discovered...

The Word of Blake

• After Comstar made the controversial decision to reform itself into a secular organization, those that carried on their mystic traditions went on to form The Word of Blake. Their beliefs went from "protect human technology and information" to "we will rule humanity because no one else is worthy doing so." Granted, Comstar had these intentions all along, but the World of Blake would take it to world-shattering levels. Literally.
• The Blakists' Elite Mooks, the Manei Domini, are not to be messed with. They are assassins and super soldiers that have been so thoroughly indoctrinated and augmented with cybernetics that it's debatable if they're even human anymore. They can blend in with any crowd, listen in on any conversation, fast-talk their way out of capture and kill someone before they even have time to react. Some of them have gone so far as to make themselves uglier with cosmetic surgery just so they can scare the living crap out of their targets.
  • The Word of Blake owns and operates their own Protomechs. Unlike the Clans, who have specially-bred pilots small enough to fit in their cramped cockpits, the Manei Domini simply amputate the limbs of one of their own and hardwire them into the machine itself like a Dreadnaught. The Clan's Protomech pilots may end up thinking that the machine is their body, but for the Manei Domini, it is their body.
• The Jihad. A war so utterly off the rails that it earned its own folder.

The Jihad

• Comstar had long held the belief in a prophecy that they will lead the Second Star League in their image. When the Star League instead disbanded by a vote of no-confidence, thereby rendering the prophecy null and void, the Word of Blake was upset and decided to make the sane and rational decision to launch the most violent conflict in human history.
• After their threats to force the Successor States to reform the Star League went unheeded, the Word of Blake went absolutely apeshit and launched a two-front campaign against literally every other faction. Half of their assault came in the form of a massive information warfare campaign to turn every faction against another in a series of false flags and "whiting out" all communication. The other half? Attacking every capital and industrial center they could reach with WMDs. Nuclear. Chemical. And biological.
• One of the biological weapons released during the Jihad was the "Curse of Galedon." The virus was so deadly that it single-handedly wiped out the population of two planets: An Ting and Galedon V. Not even bombing their cities from orbit worked to halt the spread.
  • Scarier still is that it was released by accident during a battle between the Draconis Combine and the Federated Suns with zero Blakist involvement. The reason the weapon was even developed in the first place was to act as a last resort against the Federated Suns in case the Combine was on the verge of total destruction.
• During the conflict between the St. Ives Compact and the Capellan Confederation, Kali Liao came up with a plan to end the war swiftly and with minimal effort: by bombing St. Ives targets with nerve gas. While her brother Sun-Tzu Liao intervened and did everything in his power to stop the "Black May" incident, he was too late: the war between the two nations intensified greatly and more than one-hundred-thousand people died in the attacks. His efforts were not in vain, however: had his sister carried out her plans without a hitch, the death toll would have been one million.
• On the 300th anniversary of Jerome Blake's founding of Comstar, the Word of Blake, naturally, celebrated the occasion with a series of terrorist attacks across the entire Inner Sphere. Their actions included gassing entire cities, triggering a planetwide foot-and-mouth disease outbreak on Thessalonika and even a botched nuclear strike that set off a freak wildfire so out of control that it turned almost the entire population of Marduk into amateur firefighters. Some of these attacks were even aimed at schools and hospitals. This piece of artwork, which shows a Grand Titan under attack while the people at its feet choke to death on a chemical weapon, gives us only an idea of the sheer horror that the people of the Inner Sphere had to go through.
  • The people in the image are Knights of the Inner Sphere, a unit intended as an embodiment of chivalry and honor, as an ideal for people to look up to—and they were among the Word of Blake's very first targets. In the Blakists' eyes, chivalry was dead because they fully intended to kill it themselves.
• Thomas Marik (the real one, not his body-double), better known as The Master of the Word of Blake, has gone down as one of the biggest monsters of the Battletech universe for single-handedly starting the Jihad after becoming radicalized by the writings of the fanatical Primus Conrad Toyama.
• The violence of the Jihad is summed up in a rather iconic piece of cover art for the Blake Ascending sourcebook. The lower half of the image shows a BattleMech caught in the shockwave of a nuclear explosion while the upper half shows a Word of Blake captain at the bridge of his Warship, cackling like a maniac as he watches the carnage from orbit.
  • The same spirit is captured on the cover of Final Reckoning◊, showing Thomas Marik almost jubilant at the orbital missiles raining down upon him.
• The fate of Fritz Donner. The former CO of the Circinus Federation's Black Warriors, Donner was captured by the Word of Blake and "interrogated" for a solid four years until he finally broke, brainwashed by Precentor Apollyon into suicide bombing the diplomatic summit on Arc-Royal. Unfortunately for the Inner Sphere, many dignitaries were killed in the blast and their war against the Blakists was delayed. Unfortunately for the Word of Blake, one of the casualties was Khan Bjorn Jorgensson of Clan Ghost Bear. Apollyon quickly learned why you never piss off the Ghost Bears.
• Even throughout the long, brutal Succession Wars, Mechwarriors were seen as modern-day knights in shining armor: exemplars of chivalry with their mechs as their steeds. The Jihad was so brutal - so terrifyingly violent - that it lead to the death of this way of thinking around the end of the war. The Succession Wars lasted for three-hundred years and nearly saw mankind revert to the stone age. The Jihad lasted for fourteen years, yet it permanently ruined the heroic trappings that Mechwarriors were given in the Succession Wars. Either the Word of Blake's white-out of the HPG network prevented propaganda outlets from doing their job or the Jihad was just that violent. Or both.
• Shock artist and playwright Belazs Nagy was no stranger to controversial forms of self-expression, most notably his 3042 opus, The Rape of Capella, which juxtaposed war crime footage with survivor interviews to paint a lurid portrait of the Federated Suns' rampant militarism. While he had long held a reputation for protesting just about everything the Davions said, did or even wore, it was the opening night of his 3072 play about the Inner Sphere's role in the Jihad, Our Holy Mission, that finally proved to be his undoing. Already infuriated by the play's sympathetic portrayal of the Word of Blake, the audience finally snapped when Nagy himself ended the play with what was heavily implied to be an Aristocrats joke at the Davion family's expense, breaking out into a riot that ended with the playwright being hanged from a lamppost outside the theater.
• In the closing years of the Jihad, Thomas Marik was naturally considered public enemy number one to the entire human race. So hated was he that his death was worth millions of lives worth of collateral damage. Just ask the Principality of Regulus, who nuked every single planet that the Master fled to. Until the Circinus Federation, being the absolute geniuses that they were, decided to shelter him. Now that Marik had nowhere else to run, they sterilized the planet with cobalt-laced nuclear weapons from orbit, ensuring that absolutely nothing would grow there ever again. Not even microbial life.

Wars of Reaving

• While the Word of Blake was busy with its apocalyptic temper tantrum, the Clans were occupied with a civil war that began, progressed and ended in genocide. ilKhan Brett Andrews wanted to "purge" the Clans of all "Inner Sphere taint" through Trials of Reaving. A cabal of disgruntled Clan scientists, The Society, feared for their genetic research and decided to secretly stage rebellions across all of Clan space. The end result was an interstellar parade of war crimes that resulted in the brutal annihilation of Clans Steel Viper, Blood Spirit, Ice Hellion, Fire Mandrill and the newly-resurrected Clan Burrock.
  • The invading Clans were spared because of how distant they were from their homeworld kin. However, they were forever shunned and outcast for being "tainted" by the Inner Sphere's "barbaric" way of life. Even Clan Wolf, which was chosen by Kerensky himself and Clan Jade Falcon, which was the most ardently conservative of all the Clans. All because the homeworld Clans viewed the vast majority of humankind as irredeemably backwards.
• The Society, who rubbed salt into the wound that Andrews opened, are members of the Clans' Scientist Caste resentful of not only their warrior-driven hierarchy, but anything that would impede their research. Such as morals, ethics or human rights. They will shut down mechs and infrastructure with cyber warfare campaigns, release biological weapons that would only kill people of a certain bloodline and enslave anyone they got their hands on to use as test subjects.
  • The few survivors of the campaign of genocide against planet Arcadia were Society test subjects that somehow managed to break free, found wandering through its wastelands. It's never mentioned what was done to them, but it was apparently so bad that it left them utterly insane.
• The cataclysmic end of Clan Blood Spirit was the grand finale to the Wars of Reaving. Star Adder, having emerged as the most powerful of the Homeworld Clans, would enact a global campaign of genocide against their most hated enemy. Every asset of the Blood Spirit was destroyed. Every Blood Chapel, every planet, every city, every mech, every ship and every man, woman and child: utterly annihilated.
• Even after the horrors of the Wars of Reaving, an ideological faction formed within the Clans known as the Aggressors. Instead of killing all vestiges of Inner Sphere "contamination" within their society, they want to destroy the Inner Sphere entirely. And keep in mind that the Inner Sphere is comprised of over two-thousand planets over the span of more than five-hundred lightyears. Thankfully, even the Clans find them too extreme and work to suppress their influence, but if disgruntled scientists could kick off the Clans' deadliest conflict, what's stopping a generation of bloodthirsty Mechwarriors from starting something far worse?
  • Making this even worse: when the Clans were initially founded, they were split into the political factions of Wardens, who believed they should stand ready to defend the Inner Sphere in its Darkest Hour, and Crusaders, who believed that they should conquer it and rebuild the Star League in their own image. With the Warden faction being the dominant ideology from the beginning. Over time however, as the Clans grew bored with waiting for a threat that never materialized, the Crusaders slowly grew in popularity until they were the majority, leading to the invasion. Who's to say history won't repeat itself? That the Aggressors won't steadily gain numbers and momentum to kick off a new invasion with the goal of burning the whole Inner Sphere to the ground?
• The Homeworld half of Clan Hell's Horses was forever "tainted" in the eyes of their fellow Clans for their dealings with the mercenary Kell Hounds and Clan Wolf-in-Exile, forced to be rebranded as Clan Stone Lion. One of their rituals, meant to purge themselves of this perceived corruption, is the "Cleansing Path" meant for Bloodnamed warriors, which entails a fasting retreat for forty hours in a handmade sweat lodge. After which they are attacked by four of their fellow Clanners with thorned branches that they must fight off without any equipment. And without any clothes. The more scars, the more honor they receive - and even more if they do so without uttering a cry of pain. The Clan's founder, Khan Delvillar, not only founded this ritual but perfected it, going on a 120 hour long fast that has yet to be exceeded.
• Once the bloodshed had finally ended, the Homeworld Clans embraced the Bastion doctrine, believing that nothing from the Inner Sphere or the Periphery should be allowed to "contaminate" the Clan way of life. Not even gene stock from the Star League that the Clans viewed with such reverent awe, as Clan Goliath Scorpion (later known as Escorpion Imperio and then the Scorpion Empire) found out the hard way.

Dark Age

• On August 7th, 3132, after nearly half a century of unprecedented peace under the rule of the Republic of the Sphere, an unknown party was able to sabotage a whopping eighty percent of all HPG generators in an event known as "Grey Monday", effectively destroying mankind's method of faster-than-light communication. The resulting "Dark Age" had a dramatic effect on the borders and territories of the entire Inner Sphere. The biggest effect being the Clans' most successful invasion yet, with Clan Wolf (later renamed as the Wolf Empire) taking a giant chunk out of the Lyran Alliance and the Clan Jade Falcon Occupation Zone pushing itself against the Republic's borders. It seems the Clans' dream of conquering Terra may finally come true after all.
• Under the rule of Khan Malvina Hazen, appropriately dubbed the "Chinggis Khan", Clan Jade Falcon embraced a bastardized version of the Hell's Horses' "Mongol Doctrine" and flushed all sense of honor and decency straight down the toilet. Unlike the Hell's Horses, who merely emulated the Mongol Empire's light cavalry tactics, the Jade Falcons followed their Rape, Pillage, and Burn aspect, executing prisoners, annihilating settlements, destroying infrastructure and even going as far as to contaminate the entire water supply of planet Apostica with weapons-grade plutonium, ensuring that its entire population died a slow, agonizing death from radiation poisoning.
  • Malvina Hazen herself is a one-person horror show. In her childhood, she murdered two members of her Sibko to make sure there was enough food to go around, treated her adopted daughter Cynthy (who was orphaned by the very Mongol Doctrine she espoused) like a pet at best and a punching bag at worst, and essentially dedicated her life to slaughtering everything that stood in the way of her ambitions. She was finally undone after being brutally stabbed by one of the people closest to her: Cynthy.
• The Jihad officially ended with the establishment of the Republic of the Sphere, but for some Word of Blake insurgents, it never ended. The most famous of these "Neo-Blakist" factions is the Kittery Resistance, responsible for the bombing of a Republic-supported library on the titular planet as revenge for the Word of Blake's defeat. The most insidious of all these groups, however, is the accelerationist White Hand, which wants to destroy society as we know it so they can rebuild it as they see fit. It's implied that they are much larger than they appear and nobody knows just how far their influence extends.

il Clan

• The closing years of the Dark Age saw what was long thought unthinkable both in-universe and by fans: the Clan conquest of Terra. After a long war across Earth with their ancient Jade Falcon rivals, the Wolf Empire is now the uncontested ruler and ilClan of the Third Star League.
• One of the forces that fought on behalf of the Wolf Empire were the Fidelis: one of the last remnants of Clan Smoke Jaguar that served the Republic of the Sphere as penance for the Clan Invasion. The reward for their service to the Wolves? The reformation of Clan Smoke Jaguar. It seems that the sacrifices made during Operation Bulldog and Operation Serpent were all for nothing...

Myths and Legends

• A series of short stories set during the Jihad era describes what might be the only recorded example of Haunted Technology in the setting. The tale starts with a detachment of Fed Com troops being thrown off-course by a minor jump drive malfunction and finding by chance a jet-black Marauder on a lifeless asteroid. What seems like a windfall quickly turns to concern as a number of inexplicable suicides and mechanically-impossible lethal maintenance accidents befall the unit, culminating in the mysterious disappearance of the Marauder's pilot during a training exercise. The tough veteran colonel of the unit decides that enough is enough and takes it out on maneuvers only to return pale and shaken to his core, whereon the Marauder is promptly hidden away in an abandoned mine and the unit swears itself to secrecy...
  • ...Until the turmoil of the Jihad causes the last surviving member of the unit to reveal the Marauder to mentally-disturbed mercenary Kevin Langstrom, who seems to feel the Marauder calling to him as a kindred spirit. One at the controls of the Marauder, Langstrom proves to be particularly bloodthirsty with a penchant for cockpit kill-shots, even killing a fellow mechwarrior in a fit of rage and sealing his body within the machine (which seems to fix a previously untraceable malfunction). Fleeing from justice, he is taken in by a band of pirates only to kill their leader and take over the band, who in turn start suffering mysterious deaths and higher-than-usual rates of attrition. The last time "Black" Langstrom was seen, he was walking alongside his Marauder - which seemingly moved by itself - to beat a rival pirate lord to death with his bare hands before vanishing to look for something "out there in the deep." His last words before leaving were, "It [the Marauder] commands me go, and go I will." Rumors of a jet-black Marauder committing atrocities have flitted around that part of space ever since...
  • There are even rumors of the Marauder turning its "head" around to reveal five eyes and a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth. This can easily be chalked up to rumors or a pirate having a really bad drug trip, but considering the nature of the incidents it was involved with, it may as well be a Mechanical Abomination.
  • Even the mech's appearance is...wrong on some subtle, fundamental level. Its lines are too smooth, it looks much larger in darkness and it lacks any serial number, manufacturer's mark or any other sign of identification. Even when it was found on a lone asteroid, it didn't show any signs of damage or exposure.
• During the Clans' conquest of the Pentagon Worlds as part of Operation Klondike, invaders from Clan Sea Fox in the Callandra region of planet Babylon were baffled to find an old woman dressed in human and animal bone jewelry waving a wand at them from a distance. Before any of them could make a move, the "witch" then disappeared in a sudden dust storm, only to be replaced by a Thunderbolt, an Ostsol and a Hunchback - the first of which was draped in the same kind of bone jewelry. Both of which dragged the survivors of their attack into a dust devil. The lucky ones wandered back to their bases mechless. The others were found decapitated and tied to the ground outside of Sea Fox camps. While the story has been debunked in-universe time and time again, it has done nothing to prevent sightings of the "Callandra Witch" from popping up sporadically during the Clan Invasion, always seen summoning mechs from out of nowhere to harass Clan forces.
  • In 3132, a Star of Sea Fox mechs on Twycross was destroyed by a Thunderbolt draped in a human and animal bone necklace. She's back.
• In 2825, a unit of BattleMechs painted in SLDF colors, bearing a mysterious emblem depicting the state of Minnesota and the number "331", invaded the Draconis Combine from out of the Deep Periphery, freeing political prisoners and looting resources. All while refusing any attempts at capture or communication before fleeing into unknown space, never to be heard from again. The most credible analysis of the surviving evidence ties them to the 331st Royal BattleMech Division, known to be one of the SLDF units that participated in Kerensky's Exodus. However, even in the ilClan era of 3151, despite centuries worth of research and investigation, not a single person is aware of whatever happened to the so-called "Minnesota Tribe."
• Once, a Black Lion-class warship was found orbiting the planet Merope. This wouldn't be noteworthy at all were it not for the fact that it disappeared upon investigation by AFFS fighters. Not jumped, not accelerated - vanished into thin-fracking-air.
  • Similar is the story of the "Vandenberg White Wings", detailing a squadron of white aerospace fighters that suddenly appeared to escort a fleet of Star League transports before suddenly disappearing again.
• SLDF General Stephen James Gaffa was a renowned war hero who piloted a Highlander with an "05" numeral and an insignia depicting three stars. After he was killed in battle, no trace of his mech was ever found. In the centuries since, Mechwarriors across the Inner Sphere have claimed to have been saved by an ancient-looking Highlander in SLDF colors with an "05" numeral. "Great Gaffa's Ghost" indeed.

Miscellaneous

• The Kearney-Fuchida Drive is the main FTL drive used in the Battletech universe and is safe and reliable if used and maintained correctly. Otherwise you might get a "misjump." Misjumps could place you in the wrong star system, strand you in deep space, send you thousands of lightyears away to a planet of talking bird aliens or fuse the entire crew inside the ship's hull.
  • It's also rather disconcerting that the only scientists that make any level of progress with advancing the Kearney-Fuchida Drive are foaming-at-the-mouth insane.
• The Smoke Jaguar is no pussycat. It's a 120kg, genetically-modified wildcat that is so aggressive, bloodthirsty and utterly ruthless that it is known to hunt and kill simply for the sport of it. And the Clan named after it lives up to this reputation and then some.
• The namesake of Clan Ice Hellion is a fanged, bipedal...thing with More Teeth than the Osmond Family and the ability to take down even the most dedicated predator through sheer numbers alone.
• Planet Lopez gives us the Branth. Massive, leather-winged, poison-spitting dragons that have been trained as flying cavalry, effective against infantry and even Battlemechs. The only reason that these creatures are seldom seen on the battlefield is because of their vulnerability to offworld microbes and disease.
• The Inner Sphere is home to all kinds of lifeforms - two stand out in the sourcebooks. One is a grinning critter with lots of teeth - the trachazoi. It's an ambush predator that loves the taste of brains. The other is the crana a large insect that paralyzes humans and drinks their blood. If the unlucky victim is a human, they can have eggs implanted in them. Crana love heat sources - including the exhausts of Battlemech heatsinks.
• Inferno rockets are one of the few weapons a regular infantry soldier can use to seriously threaten a BattleMech. The warhead contains a futuristic version of Napalm that sticks to anything it touches and burns hot enough (sometimes even underwater or in space, as the more expensive kinds contain their own oxidizer) to start melting armorplate and overheat a 'mech to the point that it is forced into shutdown. A 'mech hit with too many infernos will literally cook its pilot alive while they are utterly incapable of doing anything about it...not even escape, since the heat of inferno rounds tends to fuse escape hatches and ejection systems shut. MechWarriors tend to have a very healthy respect for inferno launchers and even the suspicion that a given infantry squad might have one will generally result in preemptive Disproportionate Retribution.
• The simple fact that all of the horrific, violent and outright genocidal acts committed by the villains of the setting have been done without any kind of evil, supernatural force to motivate them. Only purely human reasons like greed, hubris, desperation, nationalist fervor, religious fanaticism, prejudice, bloodlust, political extremism and outright insanity, all carried out on a galactic scale. And as real-life history can attest, humans are more than capable of carrying out unspeakable acts of death and destruction for the most irrational and trivial of reasons. Despite the opening line of this page, BattleTech may truly be even darker than Warhammer 40K- there are no warlike aliens or evil psychic gods of the hell-realms beyond normal space to blame for the endless slaughter. Only us.