BattleTech’s World Ambassador and 40 Years Of Stompy Robots – An Interview with Randall Bills

Earlier this year, Sarna reached out to Catalyst Game Labs to see if we could interview Creative Director Randall N. Bills. Then Randall decided to jet-set around the globe on a BattleTech world tour, and it’s been really hard to get our schedules aligned. Thankfully, Randall was able to spare an hour just before heading to PAX West to tell us how his world tour was going and to answer some of our burning questions, like what keeps BattleTech going for 40 years and why the Dark Age had to suck so the ilClan era could be so awesome. Enjoy.

Sean (Sarna): Thank you so much for taking some time out of your busy schedule to talk with me for Sarna.net. Let’s start with your world tour. Where have you been? What have you done? What incredible sights have you seen?

Randall N. Bills (Catalyst Game Labs): Oh my gosh. So for those who don’t know, I came up with this wacky idea. It actually started last year when I went to Essen. Outside of the United States, Germany is the second biggest bastion of our community and has been from the very beginning. I do multiple shows a year in the US but only really do one one in Germany in Essen. 

And unlike in the US where we’re much more used to traveling some distance, people in Europe just don’t travel very often. And so even though Essen is a good-sized city of 500,000 people, there’s still a ton of people that just don’t make the trip. Twenty to thirty miles to us is nothing, but that’s a big deal to most Europeans to travel.

Sean: They bike everywhere, but 30 miles is a long way to bike.

Randall: Exactly, right. And so I went way East in Germany, clear to the Austrian border, to visit a community out there just to sit down at their table to thank them for helping us crack into the top 20 biggest Kickstarters of all time. To thank them for being in this moment where BattleTech is now bigger and more exposed and has more people playing than in all of its 40 years.

And it went so well and it was just so amazing that I came up with this idea of like hey, let me do that as much as I can. Obviously, I still have to try to get all my other work done and I have to go to all these other conventions, so it’s always pretty complicated. I was literally just putting the finishing touches on my fourth leg where I’m trying to weave it in between shows that I’m already going to be attending and then with local demo agents so that we can support and thank them as much as possible at their local game stores that have supported us.

It’s this big, huge, giant thing. And my first leg was just after AdeptiCon. I hit a couple of Midland states in the United States. And then on my second leg, I went over to Spain, then a train through France, and then circled all over the UK including the UK Games Expo. I literally did this giant spiral all the way through the UK to end in Ireland. Then over to the West of Canada and made four or five more stops there, and then I did a very short little leg in the Southwest of the US: Salt Lake, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Diego. 

This next one, I am doing PAX West, which is local here in Seattle, and then I fly back over to Europe but I’m actually going to be hitting the East because the first part was mostly on the West side of Europe. I’m going from Helsinki to Poznan, Poland to Budapest, Prague, Hamburg, down to Italy, then Essen. And then because it’s all lining up correctly, PAX Australia, which we’ve been trying to get to forever. It’s usually the exact same weekend as Essen, and this year it just happens to be the week after. 

I’m wrapping the globe and going down to Australia and New Zealand, hitting Hawaii on the way back. You’re literally flying over it when you’re going from New Zealand back up to Seattle. It’s glorious and awesome.

Obviously, I love traveling and seeing new places and eating new food, connecting with these communities. I could go on and on and on about the fact that, while of course, we love giant stompy robots, I’ve become convinced that playing games is simply a medium that we use to have better connections with people. I see that everywhere I go. 

To be able to sit at those tables and connect with these amazing communities and these amazing people from all over the world… Really, I could get pretty emotional if I talked too much about it.

I’ve had my dream job my whole life, and these communities have helped to make that happen. I’ve been able to give back in creating this amazing game and being a part of a fantastic team of Ray and Aaron and Anthony and Brent and on and on and on all the people that have contributed to this amazing universe and game that we love to talk about it, read about and play out on the table.

It’s been a tour I will never forget and probably never do again because, you know, this is brutally long. 

Sean: Yep, those are some very long flights. 

Randall: I think there’s a stretch of four days in a row where we’re getting up at like 4 AM to get 6 AM flights to then go and game that evening to then get up at 4 AM to do it again through like four straight countries because that’s just how it had to work to be able to go to these communities. I’m gonna crawl a desiccated corpse across the finish line at the end of the year, but it will hopefully be an experience that all of us will have shared together that we’ll never forget.

Sean: Well, this leads us to our next question. Would it be fair to call you sort of BattleTech‘s ambassador these days? Is that your official role at Catalyst Game Labs now? 

Randall: So I have many hats. The term that I wear now is Creative Director which basically means that there’s really no aspect of Catalyst as a whole that I don’t touch in some aspect.

For BattleTech, yeah, I think ambassador is a great word for that. I’ve been at this for so long that I’ve just kind of become the face of BattleTech. And I enjoy it. I love it. Anyone who knows me or sees me talk for more than 10 seconds knows how much BattleTech means to me and how much I love this community.

I will always sing the praises of Ray and Aaron and the team—the BattleTech line developer and assistant line developer—I give them all the assistance that I can. They have been just amazing and what they have done for this line. It’s really a team effort, I just happen to be the tip of that spear that most people know and recognize, and I’m the one out shaking hands and thanking people for being a part of this community.

Sean: Let’s talk a little bit about your BattleTech history. Obviously, you’ve been with BattleTech for way longer than most people, and you’ve been through four companies: FASA, FanPro, WizKids, and now Catalyst Game Labs. What would you say are the major differences in culture between these four companies?

Randall: Interestingly enough, not nearly as much as you might assume because so many of the people who were involved in each of those steps are still involved. FASA, FanPro, WizKids, and now Catalyst Game Labs—it is the people who have loved it and wanted to be a part of it and have had amazing skills in various ways to continue to be a part of that.

Obviously, some team members have gone away, and others have come on. For example, when we sit down for one of our big summits or we go to KarenskyCon—which is our convention to celebrate the biggest backers that have helped in our Kickstarters—Jordan Weisman shows up, the original creator of the game, who I still talk to now and then. I consider him a great friend. Michael Stackpole, who I can remember meeting when I was 17 and totally losing it geekdom-wise to have an author of a BattleTech novel signing a book. And now we are great friends and we sit at the same table and have our books signed together.

It’s really a family vibe. I would say Catalyst probably takes that to a whole other level. Part of that is because we are now getting old enough that our kids are now up and working with us. And so it is very much a family and friends type of environment. Anyone who’s worked in those environments knows that causes some issues now and then, but on the whole, I’m not made for corporate America. I’m made for this, right? 

Sean: Same.

Randall: I like to joke now that I was genetically predisposed to making games and being a geek, and that follows that I was very much destined to be in an environment where we’re all family and friends. We deal with all the problems that family and friends do, but I love this company dearly. And every person who works with us is more family than just a friend. 

You know, when I started at FASA, they were still very much at the zenith of what FASA was in 1996. I only worked at WizKids full-time for one year, but I worked with them extensively across the entire span of their existence. And then FanPro was the dark years, right? There’s no doubt about it. Those were pretty hard years for Classic BattleTech. 

I know the Jihad brings up lots of controversy for people. Some love it, some hate it. I completely understand the hate for it. It was very different and unusual. I could talk for hours and hours and hours about all the hamstrings that were thrown in our way for the storyline. And I have; go find it! But at the same time, I actually did love it because it allowed us to do sourcebooks and tell stories in brand new ways that we had never done before. I think those who did love the Jihad, that’s part of why they loved it. 

But it’s what’s kind of amazing to be in a long-lived property like this. Any such property—Star Trek, Star Wars, you name it—has ups and downs. It’s just not possible to always have ups. In fact, my mother-in-law is living with us now, Nana, she’s an amazing woman and she’s a diehard Star Trek fan who had never watched Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Now, I will be nice and I will not comment on some previous series that I had all sorts of problems with. I think some of those were the lows of where we were at. Whereas I think Strange New Worlds is fantastic. Kind of a return to what we love while still doing some new things. 

Kind of the same thing with BattleTech; you can look at its ups and downs. And even while I enjoyed aspects of the Jihad and what we did there—still very proud of that—it’s glorious to be at this moment where we’re back at a huge high.

The plastic ‘Mechs are amazing—we all want more of them so we can just pour them over ourselves when we get them. I’ve got an ocean here on my shelf and I can’t wait to get more where we can have something like the BattleTech Universe book come out. I just saw a review from Doug, who’s a good friend of ours who has worked with other companies, where he went on and on and on talking about the Universe book.

At the end of the day, it all kind of has the same feeling, but definitely some unique aspects. But I think you’ll find in almost any tabletop gaming company, it almost always has that family and friends vibe to it. It’s just that you have to get through the fact that you’re overworked and underpaid and all the usual starving artist cliches. But you can’t help yourself because this is just what you have to do. 

Sean: What do you think has given BattleTech the sort of longevity that it has? And what keeps BattleTech going where other universes fail? 

Randall: So once again, I could talk for years and years and years, I mean, years—

Sean: We don’t have that much time.

Randall: When we had the Kickstarter a year ago, I literally had hundred-million-dollar company tech bros contacting us to go, “Hey, I just saw you raise seven million on your Kickstarter. How did you do that?” And usually, I just end the conversation instantly by, well, you start with a 40-year-old IP, and they’re like, “Oh, click.”

But there are so many facets to this. A lot of it was just amazing serendipity between Jordan and Mitch and their Harebrained Schemes, the BATTLETECH computer game that was just chef’s kiss. That thing was amazing. When they launched their Kickstarter, to when they delivered, to when they did their DLCs—it all wove in perfectly when we were coming out with our brand new box sets. Then our Kickstarter to Piranha Games with continuing support for MechWarrior Online and then MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, right? Like there’s all of those aspects to it. 

You also have much larger things like the zeitgeist of giant robots just waxing and waning. We happened to hit a wax moment where giant robots were cool again and big giant robots were happening in Hollywood. That’s why we have this massive ascendant thing, right? But I think If you strip it all away and talk about what made it survive, I think I would have to put it down to two or three thousand people that never went away. 

And it’s because BattleTech is an experiential story. If you could look the other way behind me, you would see a wall of tabletop miniature games—over a hundred of them. I’ve played them all. I’ve enjoyed almost all of them. Some of them I’ve loved to death. Absolutely brilliant, amazing games. But in all of that, there is nothing quite like BattleTech. In the fact that when I roll a dice, a story instantly happens. 

I’m running a local campaign—you know, when I’m actually in town, so huge shout out to my local guys that put up with the fact that they’ve I think played the campaign once this year—but my dice hate me.  They betray me like there’s no ifs, ands, or buts. In one of the last campaigns, I was sick and tired of it. They had handily won like four games in a row and walked away with an ocean of salvage. And so I’m like, screw that! I’m actually going to tailor-design a force that’s going to put the fear of God back into them!

I’m not that type of GM, but they really needed it, right? They’ve just been getting endless DropShip loads of salvage. They’re like, “I think we actually have honest-to-goodness plot armor,” because of course all my dice were betraying me. But the first time I had a giant shot on fours with PPCs—it was a targeting computer and SBAs and you name it—and I roll snake eyes. The whole table paused. And I’m immediately like, Oh, that tech is getting fired, he misaligned those particle accelerators. We all just roared laughing. 

That got me thinking—and really has kind of crystallized my thesis—that it is the story that matters. In fact for BattleTech, shockingly enough, it is almost more the moments that we don’t win. It’s the moments of amazing loss that we remember and tell the stories more about.

BattleTech‘s a miniatures game, but it’s more than a miniatures game. It’s kind of a role-playing game, it’s kind of a board game, it’s got all of these elements mixed together, and I don’t believe that any modern game company would be as daring to mix that many types of games for fear of putting people off. BattleTech drives stories in ways that no other experience has or can.

In fact, I just had it at Gen Con, where somebody came up to me and shared a story about how they faced Natasha Kerensky on the battlefield, and they got their heads handed to them, and wasn’t it glorious? That way their own stories then weave back into all these endless novels that you can see behind me. It just creates a lasting impression—you can’t get it out of your system. 

Even the people that went away for decades, the vast majority of them never actually got rid of their stuff. That’s the other thing that I’ve heard over and over now in this renaissance. People are like, “I’m back and I’m playing. I dug out my own stuff right now.” And then you’ve got the guy that’s like, “Oh, I sold it all,” or “I lost it.” Eight out of ten times he’s like, “Yeah, it’s in a trunk. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it,” because it meant so much to him. Because his friendships were entwined in the stories that we tell ourselves.

BattleTech‘s capacity for telling a story that we connect with—just like the best movie you’ve ever seen or the best novel you’ve ever read—is so powerful that that’s what kept it alive through all the years.

A huge shout out to those few thousand fans who did stick with us through those dark times, but I think that’s why they stuck with us. And it’s certainly why I stuck with it; there’s something about the BattleTech experience that I can’t get anywhere else, so I don’t want to go anywhere else.

Now, that being said, I do go everywhere, right? Like there’s a whole other wall of role-playing games and a whole other wall of board games, but BattleTech seems to be a synthesis of all of that in one. And then throw on the fact giant stompy robots are awesome. 

Sean: Speaking of those giant stompy robots, I was speaking with Brent late last year. He explained that everyone at CGL has a list of ‘Mechs they want to see remade in the new plastic. What is on your list that has yet to be redone? 

Randall: Hands down, it would be the Blood Kite. And the reason it’s the Blood Kite is twofold: one, I actually think it’s an amazing design, and two, it’s insanely ugly. 

Sean: It’s very Macross almost. Like if you were to make a Macross ‘Mech, but actually give it the number of missile tubes it needed to fire all those dozens of missiles.

Randall: I would completely agree, very Macross. But also it was a part of the Blood Spirits. Until I wrote up the Blood Spirits and created that faction as part of the Field Manual series there have been maybe five sentences written about the Blood Spirits in all the previous history. So from a creative standpoint from a BattleTech fan who was on the other side for a decade, to be able to create something whole-cloth that is then woven into the universe is still that magical experience.

The Blood Kite wasn’t the very first design that I got published, but it was the very first design I got published as part of creating this whole new slice in BattleTech. I still think it’s a phenomenal design because the Blood Spirits are always resource-starved, so it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that a lot of guys have. But because of that fact, it’s a brutal zombie of a ‘Mech that can get the job done. 

But I also don’t push too hard to get it remade because why in the world is there a Blood Kite in the modern era, right? But hopefully someday I will still get to see my Blood Kite come out. 

Sean: Hopefully one day. Let’s talk a little about the modern ilClan era. Most people would say the Dark Age was a bit of a low point, but it also represented almost a reboot of BattleTech, a kind of leap forward, and I’m getting a little bit of that feeling out of the ilClan era. How did you approach the ilClan era to first of all tie up all these loose ends and then also push BattleTech forward narratively?

Randall: In all of this, huge shout out to John Helfers, who’s our line fiction editor, and Aaron and Ray. They did so much more work on shepherding this forward. There are many highs and lows of the Dark Age. The last KerenskyCon that Jordan came out to, he literally started his presentation with, “I’m just going to apologize for the Dark Age out of the gate, and then let’s get beyond that.” There wasn’t a lot of cool there. I personally think the last dozen novels or so, basically starting with Jason Hardy‘s The Scorpion Jar, ramped up to some incredibly cool stories and really brought that flavor of BattleTech back.

There were a lot of lows—a lot of problems—because there were so many things trying to be done. We’re trying to do the Classic BattleTech era. Jordan and WizKids were trying to do their MechWarrior: Dark Age era. It created a lot of messiness. To be super blunt, it meant that getting out of the Dark Age, we knew that some of what would happen wouldn’t be very satisfactory. It’s just so big and so wide and so many good and bad elements that we could never wrap them all up appropriately and completely. 

At the same time, we didn’t want to pull a Star Wars where we’re just gonna axe it all and push everything out into the ‘it’s not canon now’ zone. I loathe that. There are many stories that Star Wars decanonized that are amazing, and in decanonizing them, you are almost dehumanizing the artists and authors that were a part of making all that happen, that put their blood, sweat, and tears into it, often under not very favorable conditions from management. It pushes those people out. 

So I didn’t want to do that. Instead, we accept that in a long property like this, there are just some warts that come along with the diamonds. Some of that was just ourselves coming to terms with there are going to be some things that people aren’t going to like how it wrapped up. But we just have to wrap up and get to a new era where we can take all that we’ve learned in the past. We can craft this fun new era that we can time with all the new plastics and the box sets, and it can feel like this fresh new experience, both for long-time players as well as the brand-new players.

I think on the whole we have done that. You know, I hear constantly about how much people that are playing in the new era for example love the Hinterlands. The Hinterlands is such a wonderful homage to the Chaos March era of the late Clan Invasion, and really taken to a whole other level. That’s where I run my local campaign. I literally have the Hot Spots: Hinterlands book that’s coming out in a month or two for everyone. 

It was just coming to that, “We’re going to keep the warts and all of it up as best we can.” This means it won’t be the best, but hopefully we’ll have some really cool moments that end it, and it will open up what hopefully can be one of the best eras we’ve had in a lot of decades 

Sean: The Dark Age wasn’t all bad. I personally liked a bunch of quirky ‘Mechs that came out of Dark Age. But it did do another thing that we hadn’t seen in BattleTech: it allowed factions to meet where otherwise they would not have done so. Like Clans fighting in Marik space, for example.

Randall: Yeah. 

Sean: If you had the chance to take any two factions in BattleTech and just smash them together for a fight, which two factions would it be?

Randall: Oh, what a great question. I get asked these types of questions all the time, but I’m not sure that’s a question I have ever been asked. I assume the presupposition is that they have never met before on the battlefield. Huh.

Well, I have a soft spot for the Taurian Concordat. I think they get a bad rap. I think they’re just hard-scrabbling pioneers who got dumped on for a millennium from the Inner Sphere. And so actually having them meet some of the Clans would be kind of fascinating to me. Maybe there’s a Sea Fox operating awful close to them. In a lot of ways, having the Taurian mashup against Clan Sea Fox could be pretty awesome, I think. 

Sean: That would be interesting. We’d see the Taurian Concordant with all their rocket ‘Mechs just doing one-shots against all these Tiburons.

Randall: Ah, that would be great. I brought out the Longbow variant with all those rockets on it, which is a total one-shot thing, right? I can never do it again because now my players know that it exists, but I didn’t quite know this thing existed. They thought it was a regular Longbow and were running a Kodiak up against it.

I didn’t kill the Kodiak, but man, I hammered the crap out of it and threw it over to the ground. And then of course the Longbow is done and I still lost the scenario, but in that one moment, it was glory. Usually, the Kodiak just tears me up, but for once I got to pay him back a little.

Sean: Speaking of the Sea Foxes, this question concerns the melded technology we have in the ilClan era. Some arms manufacturers have access to Clan tech, and some don’t, which causes us to see interesting mixed-tech variants in the Recognition Guides. 

Would you say we’ve reached the era where Clan tech is the standard, and anything else is just made to be a lesser but cheaper ‘Mech? Is there still a point to having Inner Sphere-grade weapons or equipment in the ilClan era?

Randall: That’s another great question. If it’s completely within the universe, so you have to deal with Sea Bills, you have to deal with infrastructure, and so on, I believe cheaper is still better than expensive. 

All these decades later you can still have an endlessly fascinating conversation about how the Tiger tank was the most engineered, most perfect tank that ever happened, but an ocean of crappy cheap Shermans won the war, right? So cheap and effective will outdo expensive and fantastic almost every day of the week.

Now, if you’re looking just at the tabletop game and you have a ‘Mech and I have a ‘Mech and they’re Battle Value balanced… Actually, I think we’ve reached a place where there are several Inner Sphere designs that can hold their own against Clan tech.

it’s not always that way. Every now and then I will still have somebody that will come up to me and make the comment of, “Oh, you know, the Improved Heavy Gauss Rifle is totally gross. I can’t believe that thing exists,” or something along those lines. And my response will always be, I believe the three most powerful weapons ever made in BattleTech are still the Clan ER PPC, the Clan Large Pulse Laser, and, shockingly enough, just the humble little Medium Laser. From weight to heat, every weapon has several stats, and if you combine all of those stats, those three still reign supreme. 

The Clans just have a leg-up on what they can do, but I really do think that we have reached a place now where that’s fairly balanced. It’s actually one of the things I love about the ilClan era. Again, huge shout out to Ray and Aaron and all the team that has done the Recognition Guides. All those new variants are just challenging, and challenging in a good way to use, right?

In this household, one of the things we love to death is the Hammerhead. That ‘Mech is amazingly fun, super effective, just the mixture of it. You don’t always have to have Clan weapons, but having a couple on is going to help. But I really do believe we’ve kind of reached this place where some Inner Sphere ‘Mechs absolutely can hold their own against the Clan.

To me, this fight against Inner Sphere and Clan tech is less interesting than was the ‘Mech fun to use, and did it push you to use new tactics? We did a one-off game last week where I threw down the McCarron’s Armored Cavalry pack that’s going to be coming this fall. And it has the Awesome that has four ER PPCs on it. And you know what? That thing is just totally hellacious. 

And it’s also just utterly boring at the end of the day; four, four, three, four, four, three, four, four, three, and I never move out of my heavy woods. If all you want to do is just beat the other guy, that’s what you take. But for me, it’s far more interesting to take a challenging ‘Mech that pushes me to find new tactics and then I win. That’s far more interesting to me. 

Sean: How do you feel about how often the timeline advances currently? Do you think it’s too slow? Too fast? Have we maybe spent too much time in the Hinterlands already? Or do you feel like this is a good pace to move the timeline forward and hit major events? 

Randall: I think in the best of all worlds, it could have gone a little faster. But these big universe-updating campaign books of Tamar Rising, Empire Alone, Dominions Divided, and now ilKhan’s Eyes Only—that’s at the printer and we’ll be out at the end of the year—they are a crap ton of work to do. Then combine that with this mega Kickstarter—25,000-plus backers and 500 SKUs that we had to make and deliver—it just constantly sucked all the oxygen out of the room. 

And so on the one hand, you might be like, “Oh, I wish we could have gotten it out a little faster.” But on the other hand, we had a top 20 Kickstarter of all time and all this amazing plastic. And now the entire industry and the whole world is looking at BattleTech. 

I probably would have preferred that we could have gotten them out a little quicker, but now that this last one is coming out and the whole setting now has a book you can play in, then we should be getting back to what was pretty much standard across almost the entire 40 years. Which was roughly a year or year and a half in-universe per actual year.

I don’t see a reason why we won’t be returning to that. But there are just a lot of factors at play in this specific moment that made this a slower rollout of the era. 

Sean: This question comes from a Sarna staffer. Apparently, there are some German novels that are set in the Star League era. How would you feel about revisiting some of these past eras in BattleTech‘s history? Or is the main effort to sort of keep pushing the ilClan era forward? 

Randall: So the primary push will always be pushing into the new era, but we always support previous eras.

And we have, in fact. I don’t know if they’re publishing next year or at least being written, but I know for a fact that we have the Wars of Reaving trilogy that was unlocked by the Kickstarter. But we also have a series of Jihad novels coming out so that the Jihad can actually be experienced through novels. And then of course I did the Founding of the Clans trilogy coming out of the last Kickstarter. 

So while our primary efforts are going to be pushing forward, we know that there are a myriad of fans all over the world. Plenty of them love playing even when they’re in the new era, but now and then they like playing in the old eras, and so we always want to support that. There are always way more stories to tell than we’ll ever get to, so we have lots of support for previous eras still coming.

Sean: This is another one from a Sarna staffer, so I apologize if I’m mispronouncing this name. Apparently the official cartographer is Øystein Tvedten. Is this a name that you’re familiar with? 

The planet Bob.

Randall: Absolutely. Øystein and I have not touched base in years, but we spent a decade, decade and a half constantly working on BattleTech together. 

Sean: Alright, well there is a small planet in what I think used to be the Draconis Combine—maybe it is now part of the Outworlds Alliance—called Bob. Are you familiar with this planet? 

Randall: I am familiar with it, and to be honest, I can’t remotely remember where that name came from or how it evolved.

Sean: Okay, fair. It was originally named Dunklewälderdunklerflüssenschattenwelt, and that was my best attempt at German (I think).

Randall: Better than my attempt. I’m a bit terrible at pronouncing that. 

Sean: Our Sarna staffer thinks this is the craziest thing you have allowed Øystein to put in-universe. Can you think of anything crazier? 

Randall: Well actually I can think of something crazier. There was a world called CMO20, or something along those lines on the original map, and it got changed to Gulf Breeze. And the reason it got changed to Gulf Breeze is—I won’t name names, but when we were working on what would become the 3062 map of the Inner Sphere, one of our people working at FASA in the ‘90s was a believer in UFOs, and one of the biggest places to go see them was a place called Gulf Breeze off of Florida’s coast.

Gulf Breeze V and an orbital habitat.

He just really wanted that. And I’m like, this is a planet that’s never been mentioned, it’s never been talked about, nothing’s ever happened. Eventually maybe someday we’ll come up with some cool story that explains why it got changed, but we allowed him to change it. 

Sean: Sort of one of those planets that seemingly pop up out of nowhere. That’s not entirely accurate as often the explanation is the planet already existed, it was just depopulated or struck from stellar cartography due to the Succession Wars or the Jihad. Is there any resistance to creating new planets because of how many planets already exist?

Randall: I would say there’s a little resistance. In this instance, we weren’t creating a new planet, we were just changing the name, right? There’s a little resistance only because we already have so many planets that have never had anything written about them. 

We have a phrase around here that story is king. So I’m going to mention this just because I know that Ray, even not listening to it, is going to wince. We have people that come up to us and will be like, “Oh, when are the Home Clans going to get back on the screen again?” And our point is always, not that we’re against that, it’s just we have yet to find the story that makes it worth bringing them back. We don’t want to bring them back and have fans just be like, “Eh, I guess they’re here again,” right?

If they come back—and that could be next year, it could be a decade from now—but if they finally come back, we want to do it in a way that blows people away, that this was an amazing story to experience. 

So usually the reticence about creating a new planet is like well, what’s the story? Why couldn’t you have done that story in the dozens and dozens of other planets that you could place it on? If somebody comes up with a reason and gives us a compelling story, then we’ll be like, “Okay, you’ve got it. That’s awesome. I totally get it, now make it happen.”

I’ll even say on this world tour, I have constantly been asked, “How can I participate? How can I write a story?” And I will just yell at the top of my lungs, Shrapnel. We’re at 17, 18 is about to come out. In the last five or six, I believe every single one has had a brand new author. It’s such a perfect way for the community that wants to be authors to get a chance.

And as you do that, and as you hone your chops, and as you get better and better, and you get more stories published, then if you have an axe to grind, if you want to see this new world or whatever, then make the story that we want to see. That we believe that the community wants to see, right?

For me, it’s the Nova Cats. In fact, I have a novel I’m terribly behind on with the Nova Cats. Luckily I’m in a place and the Nova Cats are in a place where I get to shoo everyone away from it and no one gets to touch it but me. That’s not always the case. I desperately wanted to write some new Bounty Hunter stories and I had to let that go because those stories needed to get written and I haven’t been able to find the time. But often authors get this feeling of “I want to write this,” and if it’s exciting and cool and it helps the storyline, then we’re all for it.

Sean: Speaking of Spirit Cats slash Nova Cats, what else can you tell us about this upcoming Spirit Cat novel? Because they’re also one of my favorite factions.

Randall: Unfortunately, I really can’t tell you anything. This is a hundred percent on me because I always love writing wide and throwing lots of story threads out there. There may be more threads out there that are not tied off than almost any faction that I can think of. Certainly coming out of the Dark Age. I won’t wrap them all up because you never wrap up every thread, but I will be wrapping up most of them and that means there are lots of big reveals.

There’s lots of big stuff. The outline has reached a ridiculous size, but it also means I really can’t say much about it at all without perhaps spoiling whole swaths of it. You’ll just have to wait for it to come out. And I gotta get through this tour to be able to get back to actually writing. 

Sean: Writing on a plane when you’re jet-lagged can be difficult, so I totally get it. Here’s one that goes back to The Founding of the Clans. Nicholas Kerensky was for most of BattleTech‘s history a sort of mythical figure who could do no wrong, ‘The Great Father’ and all that. Anyone who said differently was seen as speaking against the emperor. 

Then with The Founding of the Clans, we found out that he was just another unhinged maniac. That actually tracks with some of the more unhinged aspects of the Clans, like the animal totems and eugenics program, to have come from a twisted mind. Did you get any hate mail from Clanners when you released those books?

Randall: Actually, I really haven’t. The reason why I think this is so has multiple parts to it.  

As is always the case, the mythology that we craft around those that have come before is never actually the thing. It’s never real. I was actually just talking with my son about this, and I’m gonna butcher the name because I can never remember it, but it’s the Celtic Boudicca, who’s the Celtic queen that defeated a Roman legion. My entire life, I have heard about this amazing Celtic queen who defeated a Roman legion, and then I fell down a rabbit hole. I did more research, and then I was down to the scholarly consensus; in reality, we don’t actually know if this person existed or not.

Everything we think we know, we don’t know anything about. I think in our heart of hearts, most of us really know that. And so most of us knew if we were ever going to write about Nicholas, it could never be what had been presented, ever. I don’t know if I completely succeeded, but I tried really hard to show that he absolutely was unhinged. But in that moment of time, and in that moment of desperation, they would have all collapsed and died if he had not done what he did. What do you do with that truth? 

I’m a big believer that humanity and history are filled with two incompatible truths about everything that we have to figure out how to deal with. The moral quandary we have to think about is he was a monster, but they all would have died without him. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten hate mail about that. Hopefully, that means that I mostly accomplished that goal.

Sean: I would say so. With the benefit of hindsight, what do you think you are the most proud of and least proud of throughout BattleTech‘s history? 

Randall: Oh, wow. What is most proud is probably twofold. One, it’s hard not to say that the new plastics, the new box sets, and this new ilClan era, that this moment that we’re in is what I’m most proud of. It would be hard not to say that because again, I started playing BattleTech in 1986, so I’ve been playing BattleTech for 38 years and working professionally on BattleTech for 28 years. I’ve seen all the ups, the downs, multiple companies, and everything under the sun. And right now, BattleTech is in the best place it’s ever been. It’s being played by more people, and is more accessible than ever before. It’s hard not to be the most proud of this moment.

Story-wise, I probably would have to go with the Founding of the Clans trilogy. I have 10-plus novels under my belt, and a legion of short stories that I’ve published, but to be able to go back into an era that is both massively written about, and yet has very little real substance written about it, and to craft a trilogy that puts a human face and a human tragedy on all of it in a way that hopefully no one really expected… It would be hard-pressed for me not to be the most proud of that. 

On the story I’m least proud of, um, luckily I don’t have to say the Dark Age because we talked about lots of warts, but lots of good stuff. Also, Loren, Stackpole, and I were all lined up against Jordan through several of the decisions going, “Jordan, don’t do this.”

There were aspects of the Jihad where it got away from us. Meaning we broke a little too much in the Age of Destruction and forgot that even in the mass destruction we should always be telling amazing stories that players can connect to. I would probably say that is what I’m least proud of at the end of the day. It kind of got away from us. 

Sean: Fair enough. Now to change the tone a bit. What is up with BattleTech: Aces? We have not heard from it in a little while. Where is it? 

Randall: So we haven’t heard from that in a little while because it’s all Mercenaries Kickstarter all the time.

We actually have mapped plans for Aces. We are basically developing four campaign boxes that will tie into the four campaign books, Tamar Rising, Empire Alone, Dominions Divided, and ilKhan’s Eyes. There’ll be ‘Mechs, there’ll be a campaign book. We are so confident in what this is going to bring to the table that we are going incredibly big on Aces. Hopefully, within the next month or so, we’re going to be able to announce it all and reveal all of our big plans.

Sean: Sounds good. Another question: when are we going to get back to the time-honored tradition of beating up the Capellan Confederation?

Randall: I believe that’s coming. There’s some awesome stuff in ilKhan’s Eyes, but I don’t know if we will ever return to the nearly two decades of them being the punching bag of the Inner Sphere. I don’t think that served anybody well. Everyone should be the punching bag now and then. But yeah, I think those who want to see that should start seeing some fun stuff in the next year or two. 

Sean: All right. Our final question for today looks at a hypothetical product, which is called BattleBronies. Do you recall what the brony phenomenon was?

Randall: Oh yeah. 

Sean: Okay, so, if you were going to create an April Fools product called BattleBronies, and you were going to do a self-insert character, what would be your character’s name and handle?

Randall: Oh, ohh, I’ve never gotten that question. It would definitely have to be some beard thing you know, Purple Hoof, Purple Beard Hoof, or something. Because I’m very much known for having some weird facial hair over the years, and then I threw some support at Rem with a pink beard at Gen Con. I liked it so much that now I’ve got the Purple Bird Strong. Now the most important question I have to ask myself is if I’m going to go clockwise or counterclockwise around the Inner Sphere for my next color. But doing these colors does lend like Purple Hoofbeard for a fun BattleBrony name.

Sean: Alright, well that’s everything I had. Thank you so much for taking some time out of your busy schedule to answer some important questions. 

Randall: Yeah, yeah, I love these interviews. I love talking about BattleTech and sharing myself with the community and the community with me. So it’s it’s all fantastic.

Sean: Have yourself safe travels as you continue to bring BattleTech to people around the world 

Randall: Thank you, and I hope you feel better man. 

Sean: Thanks so much. 

Thanks go out to Randall for being such a great sport while I desperately tried to ask fun questions while I was sweating with a fever. I wasn’t going to let a little thing like a virus delay our interview until 2025.

And as always, MechWarriors: Stay Syrupy.