Christmas Reading Settled ....

Last year I bought myself Humble Bundle's Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying bundle with a good dozen ebooks, this year I bought their Battletech* bundle (still has a day or two to run if anyone's interested), with _27_ ebooks for £16. The length is very variable, from 20-30 pages all the way up to 360, but I think it should keep me going for a while (I think it's somewhere between two thirds and a half smallish, to one-third to a half 150 pages+).

I do have a physical copy of Battletech somewhere in the loft, bought in the early 80s shortly after it came out - I think technically it's the second or third edition, so I've always been interested to a degree, but I've never been an active player. God knows what edition the rules are on now, they seem to crank out a new one every three or four years,

I was initially just going to buy the 87p taster bundle, or the £8 12 book bundle, but eventually decided I might as well get the whole bunch. If I'd bought the 87p bundle I'd definitely have been disappointed as the book I was most interested in in it turns out to be 20 pages, not the couple of hundred I'd expected. The £8 bundle looks like the one you'd actually want to have both rules and a reasonable selection of mechs to choose from, but at a quick skim through even the full bundle seems a bit lacking in ground vehicles, fighters and dropships, so it's concentrated on mech-on-mech fights, rather than the expanded range of stuff that's been around for at least 30 years...

Overall you've got the Battletech rules in two different versions, the less detailed/bigger sets of units Alpha Strike rules, a couple of large mech guidebooks plus a smaller one, several introductory guidebooks, a bunch of small guides to individual units/planets/campaigns, and a bunch of larger ones to factions/eras/major campaigns. And it looks like it's been carefully curated to leave you wanting just that one or two extra books for whichever era or faction or style of play catches your interest. 

I'd have been happy with just the rules and the couple of big mech guidebooks for that price, so everything else is a bonus and I'm not really complaining, but it's definitely designed to draw people into buying more stuff.

I did go to have a look at what's available on DriveThruRPG, and dear god there are 494 items shown when you search for Battletech! I suspect a good proportion of that is the related novels which they've been churning out for that same 30 years, and I noticed a handful that weren't really Battletech-related ('Fantasy Maps Volume 3'), but bloody hell, that's a lot!

* SF warfare in a factionalised, semi-feudal environment in which everyone who is anyone roams around in a 50' tall armed robot.

  

Someone gets it...

Guardian uses a picture of two wheelchair-using women talking and doesn't see any need to mention the wheelchairs - yes, more of this!

See:  Russia-Ukraine war at a glance: what we know on day 294 of the invasion https://t.co/nxj9Mx882B