Clearing Shrapnel with Editor Philip A. Lee

I’ve often said that we’re currently living in a BattleTech renaissance, and a big part of that is all the new fiction. New plastic minis and killer video games are great, but it’s the stories that truly capture the imaginations of fans, adding human emotions and motivations to the giant death machines that underpin BattleTech.

While novels and sourcebooks are still the mainstay of BattleTech fiction, there’s also a BattleTech magazine that provides anthologies of short stories every quarter. It’s called Shrapnel, and it went from being a stretch goal on the Clans Kickstarter to a six-year periodical that shows no sign of stopping. Shrapnel not only publishes tales from the BattleTech universe’s quieter corners, but it also provides enthusiasts with new game materials, campaign ideas, and, on rare occasions, previews of what’s to come next.

I sat down with Shrapnel Editor and author Philip A. Lee to talk about the evolution of Shrapnel from its four promised issues to 23 editions and counting. Enjoy.

Sean (Sarna): Hello, welcome, and thank you so much for tuning into Sarna TV. I have Phil A. Lee with us, Shrapnel editor extraordinaire. How are you, Phil?

Philip A. Lee (CGL): I’m doing all right. How about yourself?

Sean: I am doing really well because we’re going to be talking about your work as well as Shrapnel. You were actually one of the first people I interviewed when I started doing the news for Sarna, but that was six years ago. We’re both older, balder, and things have changed. So what has been going on for the past six years? What have been your big highlights?

Phil: Well, I finally got my first two BattleTech novels published. I’ve been writing for BattleTech since 2011, but I hadn’t actually gotten any novels published yet. They finally came out, and I’m very happy with them.

Sean: We also asked six years ago the all-important question of what’s your favourite ’Mech? Is the Stormcrow still your favorite?

Phil: Oh yeah. I don’t think anything can ever knock that off the spot.

Sean: And we’ve had the Clan Invasion Kickstarter since then, so now we have this wonderful new redesigned Stormcrow. What do you think of it?

Phil: I actually really like it. I think my only quirk is the original Stormcrow had those teeny, tiny little hands, and sure, they were goofy, but I kind of liked them. But the new version looks fine without them, and I’m not necessarily lamenting the fact that they’re gone. It’s just that it was always one of those weird little quirks where it’s like, I like that.

Sean: Yeah, it had those vestigial arms.

Phil: But the new one looks professional.

Sean: It also kind of looks like it’s an evolution of the Nova because it has those big, chunky fists. So it seems to share a more common design language. The Stormcrow always felt like a one-off Clan ‘Mech, which was weird since so many others share components; like the Koshi and Fire Moth had the same legs, and the Hellbringer and Thor might as well have been the same ‘Mech from the waist down.

Phil: The Viper actually shares the Stormcrow‘s legs, so there is a common design element. We actually had an article in Shrapnel 19 by our Tech Readout Developer, Johannes, and he wrote about some of the common design frameworks, basically explaining why some of the early Clan OmniMechs seemed like they shared components. Some people have made some interesting mix-and-matches from that to create other new ’Mechs.

Sean: Clan FrankenMech. I find Shrapnel to be my favorite way of reading BattleTech fiction, but I’m a bit behind the curve. I do have them all, it’s just getting to reading them. I need to spend more time in the bathroom.

Phil: You can read when you’re not in the bathroom. I’ve been told that it’s a magical little life hack.

Sean: Let’s move on to another question I’ve been asking a lot of folks. What’s a ’Mech that hasn’t been redesigned that you would really like to see in plastic?

Phil: Actually, that’s a good question. There are a lot of ’Mechs that I really like that haven’t actually been redesigned yet that I would really like to be redesigned. I’m a fan of Clan Blood Spirit, so I’d love to see a Stooping Hawk in plastic. I’d like to see a redesigned Blood Kite. It’s a pretty common Blood Spirit ’Mech. The Blood Kite is one of those ’Mechs where it’s like you look at it and you’re not really quite sure how to visually parse it. 

Sean: Lovecraftian ’Mech.

Phil: I remember I hadn’t actually seen the art of one for a really long time, and a friend of mine—he was offloading a bunch of ’Mechs—he was like, “Hey, do you want these?” And I was looking through his stuff, and I was like, I can’t even figure out what this is. So I just took a photo of it and sent him the photo and was like, “Hey, what ’Mech is this?” And he is like, “It’s a Blood Kite.” And I was like, “Oh, I did not put that together in my brain.” I am looking at the art. I’m looking at the actual mini, and this still does not make any sense. 

I’d love to see that one get remade because I think that Anthony and his design team could really help it make a bit more sense while still retaining the elements that make it unique.  One of the common questions about that ’Mech is, where is the cockpit?

Sean: I couldn’t tell you. I thought it was one of those rare ’Mechs that doesn’t have glass and the pilot sees through cameras and internal displays. I think the Hunchback is one of them, although it’s still pretty obvious where the Hunchback cockpit is.

Phil: Is the giant weapon above the cockpit? Was it a laser that’s above the cockpit, or is it this little bump on top of that? It is kind of hard to say. Like Assassins, I’ve seen multiple different iterations of that. 

Sean: It’s been standardised now because they’ve redesigned it, but the Assassin was one where the cockpit could have been anywhere along the front torso. 

Phil: I came across a Shrapnel story and was like, Oh yeah, this is one of those ’Mechs where I really like the look and feel of it. I haven’t really played it much on the tabletop, but I just love the aesthetic of it. And we don’t actually have one of these redesigned yet: it was the Apollo.

I immediately went out and bought an Iron Wind Metals miniature and was surprised that it’s like a single piece because there aren’t very many of those anymore. So I glued it onto a hex space and sent a photo of it to Dak, one of our layout guys. I was like, well, I guess I’m done.

Sean: I actually appreciate the Iron Wind ones that are just a single piece. I have the Tiburon, and as anybody who has the Tiburon knows, it comes to you in two dozen pieces. You have to glue together each individual fingernail. 

Phil: That was my Achilles heel. That one almost broke me.

Sean: I got there, but it took a while.

Phil: The Apollo mini I liked because even for an older sculpt, it still looks good. So I’d love to see a redesigned Apollo. I always liked the Perseus, which I believe was introduced back in Field Manual: Free Worlds League. That’s just one of those ’Mechs you like it because it’s goofy, not necessarily because it’s effective.

Sean: Before we dive into the Shrapnel questions, as much as you’re editing Shrapnel, you are still writing! Your most recent works deal with the Free Worlds League and the Clan Protectorate and how they’re trying to get along. Is there any chance we’ll be seeing more of Spirit Cats, perhaps more Spirit Cat characters aside from Star Colonel Rikkard?

Phil: I’m honestly not sure yet. I’ve got a couple of irons in the fire, some ideas that I’m working on. I’m not sure how much the Protectorate is going to factor into that, but it’s always percolating. I make no secret of being a huge fan of the Clans, a huge fan of the Free World’s League, and the Clan Protectorate. It’s like the perfect synthesis of those two worlds. I’d love to do more with them, I’m just not sure what the roadmap is for that yet.

Sean: Also, I know that you’re going to be writing one of the books for The Wars of Reaving Trilogy, which is set to come out next year. Is there anything you can tell us about the book you’ll be writing for that trilogy?

Phil: The three books in this trilogy are sort of chronological; they’re being written by different authors, and we all have our own styles. So what we did was we broke up the whole time period into certain tent poles, and we each took a specific section that dealt with things in a different way. So Craig‘s novel has a certain way of looking at it and gets to a very specific, noteworthy point in the story. And then Jason comes at it from a slightly different angle and tells the middle point of the story. Mine is basically the tail end and the wrap-up of that. 

We have shared characters throughout the entire series, but Craig’s story, for example, concentrates a lot on the Clan Wolf stuff, then Jason’s concentrates a lot on all of the Clan Burrock and Dark Caste/Society stuff, and mine’s more about the big Clan fights that’re going on. So, for example, mine is largely focused on some of the interactions between Clan Blood Spirit, Steel Viper, and the Star Adders. All the other Clans are represented, of course, but those are the three main ones that I’m focusing on in my book.

Sean: And there’s going to be a nice, happy ending, I hear.

Phil: Maybe not for everybody, but for some people.

Sean: Let’s move on to the Shrapnel questions. Shrapnel is a big part of the BattleTech lore now, and I think probably the most words BattleTech produces. Is that accurate to say? 

Phil: I’d say people say it’s the most dependable fiction product. Not to cast any aspersions on John‘s work, but Shrapnel comes out every three months like clockwork. Sometimes novel releases can get pushed for reasons that are kind of out of our control, and sometimes stuff happens. One of the early mishaps in Shrapnel was when Mike Stackpole‘s mother passed away, and so we ended up having to push the final part of his four-part serial novel to the fifth issue, just because we wanted to make sure to give him time to process that. I mean, we are human beings, so we’re not going to be like, “Give us manuscript now!”

Shrapnel is dependable in that vein, in that we are always coming out every three months, middle of the month, same four months every year. I think in terms of actual novels, the novel word count I think is a little higher than Shrapnel.

Sean: Still, there’s a lot of words coming out of Shrapnel.

Phil: Oh yeah.

Sean: And last we spoke, it was just an idea you were championing to the higher-ups. Since then, it seems to have become quite the success! So tell us the story of Shrapnel. How did it go from just an idea to this six-year-long publication?

Phil: Shrapnel happened because the BattleCorps website died. I won’t really bore with the details, I’m not going to name names or lay blame or anything, but basically the site just broke. I literally had a couple more stories in the pipeline that I was ready to publish. They were already copy edited. I was about ready to send them out, and then the site just broke. And it was broken in such a way that it was kind of irretrievable. We had backups of all the stories; none of the content was lost, but the actual site was just gone. 

At that point, I was like, “Well, crap, I’ve got these stories that I want to publish.” I had a couple more submissions I hadn’t even gotten to yet, and I also had a lot of stories that I wanted to write and publish as well, so I was sort of scrambling for an idea of what to do with that. 

It took a while. I went through a couple of different iterations, but what I wanted to do was try to change the format in a way that appealed more to modern readers. When BattleCorps first came out, having ebook stories on PDFs was pretty groundbreaking at the time—just read it on your phone or on your computer with a PDF reader. But things have changed a lot since then; most people have a Kindle or an ebook reader, or they have the Kindle app on their phone, or they get books through Apple. So we had all these stories that were in PDF form that were not as easily accessible to most people through those devices. 

Obviously, you can toss a PDF onto a Kindle or an iPad, but it’s not necessarily an easy process, and sometimes it’s a little more frustrating. Plus, we had some PDFs that were being printed in a two-column format, so you had to zoom in and then scroll to the bottom. It was just not very conducive to reading fiction.

So I was like, what if we take the idea of BattleCorps as being a place for publishing short stories and turn it into a digital form, a literary magazine, something along the lines of Asimov’s, Analog, or Fantasy & Science Fiction? It would be largely focused on the fiction, and you might have a letter from the editor or something, but it would be an actual magazine that would take reader submissions, just like we did with BattleCorps, and that people could buy and download onto their e-reader or whatnot. 

I put some mockups together, showed them to John, and John thought it was a great idea. And then I took it to Randall and Loren at Origins one year a while back, and they thought it was a great idea. But the one suggestion Loren had, which I kind of initially pushed back on, was, “This is a great idea, but how about we put some game content in it?” 

At first, I was kind of leery about that because we tried experimenting with that in BattleCorps a bit, with mixed results. I was lukewarm to the idea of putting game content in there, but I was like, “Well, I can try to put some, I dunno, unit digests or something fun, one-off small nuggets that people could do stuff with.” I got a soft green light at that point and did some work on it when I could, going through some of the old BattleCorps slush pile of submissions.

But it really wasn’t until the Clan Invasion Kickstarter came up that we’re like, “Hey, let’s make this a stretch goal. We hit this particular stretch goal, we’ll fund the BattleTech magazine for at least four issues, and we will send everyone copies of it.” 

That’s basically where it started from. At a brainstorming session during one of our little writer summits back in 2019, we settled on Shrapnel, which was one of five or six title ideas.

Sean: The birth of Shrapnel also meant the return of those old school ink drawings, like what you see in some of the really old first-publication novels. I’m not disparaging any of the new 3D art; it’s all great, but there is a certain magic to those old-school ink drawings. How do you decide which stories get those ink drawings? 

Phil: I kind of wanted to do original art in Shrapnel from the beginning. And first off, we didn’t really have the artists in our stable that could really pull off those kinds of pieces, unless we’re talking about tech readout art, which is very specific. We were basically just doing only colour sourcebooks at the time, so we didn’t really have a lot of black-and-white artists that we could draw from. 

We ended up using found art from other sources and just publishing that in black-and-white. Which was fine, it worked, but then I came across an artist on one of the BattleTech groups on social media. I saw his art and was like, wow, this is fantastic. It reminded me very specifically of Earl Geier from the sourcebooks in the late eighties, early nineties. I showed those art pieces to Ray Arrastia, the Line Developer, and he was like, “Oh, this guy is great. You need to have him try doing a couple pieces.” 

I think it was issue six—this is actually going back to answer your question of which stories get art. I went through the stories for that issue and went, “Okay, what of these stories can I pull a really good visual image from that I can write art notes for and give that to this artist and see how he’d deal with it?” So I picked a couple pieces I thought had some really good action scenes, handed them off to the artist, and he turned out some fantastic pieces. So I talked to John, and I was like, “Hey, what kind of an art budget can I get for future issues?” And we eventually just ended up ramping up the art budget, found another couple of artists to work with, and it’s gotten to the point where I try to—if possible—put a piece of art for every story. 

There are a couple of exceptions lately. I’ve had covers made based on certain stories that are actually in the issue, and when that’s the case, I usually don’t have a separate piece of art commissioned for that particular story just because I usually pick what would be the best action moment for that story and then work that in. It doesn’t really make sense to have that done twice, essentially. And I usually don’t do art for the serial novel pieces because it’s just a matter of time and economy, and usually because once we finally get around to part four of that particular serial, I give them the cover. 

Once in a great while, just because of either time crunch or artist availability, we can’t always do a piece of art for every single story. In that case, I try to focus on pieces that will make really striking images or a really good piece of storytelling where you can look at the image, and you can see what the moment is from that story as you’re reading it. Those are the kind of pieces that I try to focus on.

Sean: Let’s go back to the beginnings of Shrapnel. I remember Shrapnel #1 was mostly stories from BattleTech veterans, but since then, we’ve seen a lot of new names come into the Shrapnel fold. How many new authors would you say become repeat submitters? I know of a few of them off the top of my head. And will we soon get a lengthy novel from one of these new authors?

Phil: That’s a really good question. I’d say that once an author has gotten to maybe three stories, I’d consider them to be a repeat submitter. And I mean published stories, because I’ve had some people who have sent in a couple of different submissions before I actually buy one of their stories and publish it. 

But yeah, I’ve had a number of repeat submitters over the years. Some of those have actually already graduated to writing longer-form pieces. The one that immediately jumps out of my head is James Bixby, for example, where his very first piece of fiction, I believe, was in Shrapnel 6. He’s been regularly submitting stories ever since, to the point where he’s the current running serial novel in Shrapnel.

I’ve got a couple other folks: Giles Gammage, for example. His first story was in Shrapnel 4, and he’s sent me many submissions over the years to the point where I consider him one of my dependable regulars. One of the goals that John and I have always had with Shrapnel is the idea of having people send us short story submissions, and we’re like, “Oh, hey, this story is really, really good. Might encourage them to send us another submission if they haven’t already.” Sometimes, as soon as I buy a story, I’ll get another one from them within the next month.

The idea is to find some of these new voices and nurture their talent and craft to where they’re comfortable writing longer-form pieces. They might write a novella or maybe move on to a serial novel, a short novel, or a full-length novel down the road. 

Another great example of that is Tom Leveen. He sent me a short story, I published a couple of his short stories, and then eventually he worked up to one of the serial novels, and we published a novella from him also called Emerald Sword. His new novel, Blood Will Rise, was published early this year. So you can just see that progression path with them and a number of other authors.

Sean: Do you feel Shrapnel has enough authors, or could you always use more? And would you consider advertising Shrapnel outside the BattleTech ecosphere as a means of getting more authors to submit?

Phil: I mean, we have social media posts on Facebook that are like, “Hey, are you interested in writing a story for BattleTech? Submit to Shrapnel!” We have posts like that every once in a while just to remind people that we are actively taking submissions. But honestly, we get enough submissions that I don’t think we necessarily need to cast out a wider net. Largely because advertising to a wider audience would probably greatly increase the amount of ‘not-good submissions,’ I guess is the most polite way of saying it.

I’ve heard horror stories about other magazines that’ve gotten so many weird submissions, they’ve gotten generative AI-written stories—we haven’t gotten any of those to my knowledge. They’ll get stories that are just completely inappropriate for their venue. People will submit a story without even reading the submission guidelines. I honestly don’t really get a lot of that. It kind of makes my job a little easier because when I open a submission, I know that it’s going to be from someone who knows BattleTech and is probably a passionate fan.

That kind of helps keep the quality submissions relatively high to the point where a lot of the stories that I end up rejecting are from people that aren’t necessarily bad writers, but I can tell that they’re at an early point in their journey of discovering the craft of writing. They might have a good story idea, and the execution might not quite be there, or they might have really good writing chops, but they might have some issues with nailing the BattleTech aesthetic, or just certain storytelling elements just don’t really work, that sort of thing.

Keeping it within the BattleTech advertising ecosystem has kind of worked pretty well for us so far.

Sean: I asked this of John Helfers when I interviewed him, but I wanted to ask you, especially because you sometimes deal with authors at the beginning of their writing journey. Do you ever struggle with maintaining the tone of authors who submit their works to Shrapnel while you’re editing them?

Phil: Honestly, not really. Because again, most people who submit to Shrapnel are BattleTech fans. They’ve read all the novels, they’ve read most of the short stories, they know what’s up. They know essentially what BattleTech feels like. Every once in a while, I’ll get a submission from someone that I can tell might be a professional writer and has published other stuff in other venues, but they don’t really know BattleTech well enough to get the aesthetic. Those authors, the story might be great, and it’s got some of the BattleTech hallmarks, but I know they can push it a little more and make it more BattleTech.

There’ve been a number of times where I’ve shepherded people with that, but by and large, I don’t really get a ton of submissions from people where it’s like they’re writing about “the grim-dark future of war,” or writing material that’s wildly inappropriate. I don’t really see that a lot. I’ve gotten some stories where they wrote it as a BattleTech story, but it had some weird sci-fi elements that do not fit BattleTech at all. Not necessarily of the forbidden technologies, but it just doesn’t work as a BattleTech story. 

Every once in a while, I’ll get a story where I’m just like, “Dude, that’s gross.” And granted, we write war stories, and there’s a certain level of violence and stuff that happens. I personally prefer to keep it as realistic-but-sanitised as possible so as to get your point across, but try not to harp on it too much. Some people can be sensitive about that sort of thing.

Sean: I’m sensitive to that sort of thing. 

Phil: A lot of times when I write stuff or when I work on stuff, I think about when I go to conventions, and there’s precocious eight and 10-year-old kids who are like, “Hey, what’s new for BattleTech?” The parents are like, “He’s read them all,” and I’m thinking, Even that one novel in the ’80s with the weird problematic stuff in it? 

I sort of take that approach when it comes to the level of violence and stuff in stories, and I try not to police that too much with authors. My regular folks generally know where the tone level is. Newer folks might need a little bit of prodding, but by and large, I don’t really deal with people trying to go too far out of the box of what John and I deem appropriate for BattleTech fiction.

Sean: Speaking of sort of the grim-dark universe, we recently had the Gothic Shrapnel release, which I was not expecting.

Phil: I was not expecting it either.

Sean: How did that come to be? Did you just get all these authors coming at you like, “Hey, this sounds really fun! Let’s write about this crazy alternate reality?”

Phil: I think it was back at Adepticon earlier this year, we were having a dinner with Mike Stackpole, Bryan Young, a lot of our other prolific authors, Ray was there, and I believe it was Loren who said, “Hey, so why don’t we do an all-Gothic issue of Shrapnel?” And I was like, “We could do that. Probably have to get moving on it now because I need to have things planned out as far in advance as I feasibly can.”

When we left Adepticon, we settled on the idea. I knew Mike Stackpole wanted to write some stories, maybe take some classic scenes from The Warrior Trilogy and rewrite them with a Gothic focus. We were talking about how we might put those as a one-off story in just a regular Shrapnel issue as opposed to having a full all-Gothic issue of Shrapnel. 

But then I stopped and thought about it for a second. I know the concept of BattleTech: Gothic is not for everyone, but some people are like, “That’s really cool. I love these new ’Mechs, this world, it’s kind of a breath of fresh air from mainline BattleTech. It’s just a fun little sandbox to play in.” And then some people are just like, “It’s not really my thing.” And then there are some people who just absolutely hate it for no reason whatsoever. 

Sean: I never understood that. You don’t have to interact with Gothic if you don’t like it. 

Phil: I was thinking, well, if I actually start putting BattleTech: Gothic stories in Shrapnel, first off, some people who aren’t really aware of Gothic are going to be like, “What is this? This doesn’t make any sense.” And then the people who really hate the idea of BattleTech: Gothic are just going to be all like, “That’s a waste of time. I’m not going to read this story,” move on to the next. Or “If they’re going to keep doing this, I’m going to cancel my subscription.” And I kind of wanted not to have that happen. 

So after more conversations, Loren’s like, “Okay, all-Gothic issue of Shrapnel. Go.” And so I went and reached out to some of my more prolific authors. In fact, most of the authors in that particular issue are veterans. Mike Stackpole and Brian Young been writing stories and novels for us for quite some time now, but a lot of the folks in there are also Shrapnel veterans by this point, who are dependable enough that when I approached them to say, “Hey, do you have any interest in writing a short story for this Shrapnel Gothic issue?” they immediately jumped at the chance. They sent me some pitches for stories that they wanted to write, and then John and I chatted about the stories, and we chose the ones where we were like, “Okay, write these stories for us.” 

They wrote the stories, and then they sent them in, and I put ’em all together. And that’s how the all-Gothic issue happened. 

Sean: Will we see other BattleTech Continuum products also get the same unique Shrapnel treatment?

Phil: I’m hoping. The fact that we’ve seen how well the Gothic issue came together, I know it’s possible. I feel like the Gothic issue is like a proof of concept, too, or just seeing how well this could be put together. 

I know some people certainly might poo-poo on Gothic, but they’re like, “Rockets & Rayguns could be cool. You’re going to do a special issue for that?” At this point, I can’t promise anything, but I would like to do a special issue for each of the major themes that come out through Continuum. Whether that actually happens remains to be seen, but odds are, we’ll try to make it happen.

Sean: I think we have Anime and Rockets & Rayguns, the two that I’m aware of.

Phil: I’m not sure how many more we have in the pipeline, but those are ideally the next couple, I think.

Sean: The rules for submitting to Shrapnel are written in every issue, and we’ve already talked about the appropriate tone for a BattleTech story, but what are the unwritten rules of BattleTech writing? For example, I’ve heard that any Clan Wolverine story just goes straight into the recycling bin. 

Phil: I’d countermand that in saying that it’s got to be the right Clan Wolverine story. I’ve had people pitch me stories like, “Here’s a story about Clan Wolverine and its secret ties to the Word of Blake and ComStar. And I’m like, “No, no.” Stories that are set after the Wolverine Annihilation are off limits, too, for similar reasons—because people are going to try to do things with them that we don’t narratively want to do. 

There have been very few stories, fortunately, that I’ve rejected solely because they would canonise something that neither I nor John, nor Ray nor Randall nor Loren would want to canonise, as it would paint us all into a corner that none of us want to be in. Sometimes that’s pretty obvious—for example, Wolverine stuff. There are some story submissions that I’ve gotten that basically confirm rumours of mysterious things from BattleTech‘s past, and we’re not really about that. We would like for some things to remain mysterious—canonising the actual answer to that mystery is not really in our best interest. 

Sometimes we’ll get a story that will actually step on the toes of projects that are already in progress. For example, we’re working on our Wars of Reaving Trilogy, and I think I got one submission that would’ve run smack dab right into that and would’ve wrecked something that all three of us are working on. And so I was like, “I’m sorry, this story is fine. It’s serviceable, but it contradicts things that are already in progress, and I can’t take it because of that.” 

Those sorts of rejections are the ones that really wound my soul, especially if I can tell the author has really good writing chops. Those rejection letters I always write personally, and I always encourage them to write another story. 

Sean: Are there any other topics that people should probably avoid if they want to get published?

Phil: Well, things that are on the bleeding edge of the timeline, I would recommend people avoid those if they can. I’ve seen people wanting to write late 3152 or 3153 in years we haven’t even touched on yet in the narrative. And I recommend people not do that simply because again, it will almost certainly conflict with in-progress products.

Sean: Alright. Anything else?

Phil: Those are really the big ones. Trying to solve mysteries, especially ones that have been around for a number of years, and bleeding-edge stuff, and going into territory that has never been touched on with good reason. Sometimes, that’s just a matter of ‘write it and find out.’

Every once in a while, I’ll get an email from someone, or maybe I talk to you at a convention, and some of those verbal pitches I’ll say, “I probably wouldn’t write that because of X, Y, Z.” Or I might give them suggestions on how to tweak it to make it work, that sort of thing. But by and large, that’s the general ‘probably not a good idea’ sort of answers.

Sean: Everything published in Shrapnel is part of the BattleTech canon, so I assume everything goes through Fact Check before it gets published as part of Shrapnel, right? 

Phil: That’s correct. 

Sean: Has there ever been an issue where it became a challenge to get everything through Fact Check because of a deadline? 

Phil: Not that I can really think of. Our Fact Check team is really good at what they do. The lead for the Fact Check team, Eric Salzman, is a walking encyclopaedia of BattleTech minutiae. He does a really good job of wrangling the team. He’s a really great fact-checker himself. Anytime I need any Fact Check question answered, I go to him, and I’ll probably get a definitive answer with citations by the end of the day. 

Our Fact Check team is very thorough. We have certain people who are really good at certain things. There are a couple of people who are tech readout whisperers. They can look at an entry and spot that the armor calculation is wrong, for example, or that the order of the weapons and equipment needs to be fixed. Even stuff that is inconsequential is stuff that they know what needs to be done to fix it. 

Sometimes I have to give them a slightly shorter deadline than I need to, but usually the deadlines that they work from are long enough that they can get through and review stuff that they need to. But by and large, not really much of a problem with getting stuff through the team. 

One of the things I love about our Fact Check team—as a shout-out to them—is that they’ll point out if something is wrong, but then they’ll also do their best to provide a suggestion on how to rectify it. This is actually really helpful with things that aren’t necessarily black and white.

For example, we might have a story where it’s set on a planet, and for whatever reason, that planet doesn’t work. Maybe it was not on the right side of the border at the time or whatever. They’ll usually provide a planet that actually works, that fits the timeline, that might have the specific terrain that a battle might need, that sort of thing. And they’ll come up with suggestions like that, or they’ll be like, “Hey, this works, but maybe the date can change, and this would be a good date range and change to one of these years.” They’re very, very helpful in that regard, and they’re very efficient, so we get stuff through them pretty quickly.

Sean: Everybody I’ve spoken to loves Fact Check.

Phil: I cannot state enough how invaluable our fact-checking team is and how much I appreciate their efforts and contributions.

Sean: Moving on to another thing Shrapnel has been doing: canonize certain ’Mechs. For example, the starter Commando variant from MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries, or the Executioner-B from Ghost Bear’s Legacy. When it comes to these new ’Mech variants, was there a plan to just go through every video game to canonize ’Mechs? Or can people submit ’Mechs for canonization? How does that work?

Phil: Well, the way we choose ’Mechs for Shrapnel issues involves a very high degree of sorcery and ritual. No, I’m just kidding. It largely boils down to a regular chat with Johannes, our tech readout developer, and we usually talk about, “Hey, what would be some good ’Mechs for upcoming issues or Shrapnel?” 

Sometimes I’ll have authors pitch me ’Mechs that they want to write about. They’ll find, usually, the entries in Shrapnel are very odd variants that most people might not have seen, or they might be mentioned offhandedly in one book, and there’s just not much written about them. For example, one of the early ones was the 55-ton Centurion. You were like, wait, what from? Centurions are supposed to be 50 tons. 

Sean: MechCommander! Also, the 70-ton JagerMech.

Phil: And so we’re basically finding the weird, odd, unique ’Mechs. Maybe they might have had a sort of troubled real-life production history, as opposed to in-universe, and we just try to fill in those gaps while also introducing some new stuff. We might take a one-off mention from some random sourcebook or novel back in the day, and then we’ll stat that out. But then we’ll also come up with some more modern variants of that to give people who want to play in different eras more stuff to play with. 

By and large, we curate those tech readout entries for some specific reasons. Sometimes we’ll have one that kind of fits the theme of an issue for whatever reason, but every once in a while, I’ll reach out to our author pool and be like, “Hey, is there a ’Mech that you want to write a tech readout entry for Shrapnel? 

It really just depends. There’s a lot of calculus that goes into it, a lot of brainstorming, behind-the-scenes chats, and stuff that goes into choosing the ’Mechs. Sometimes it comes from the development side of things, sometimes it comes from authors. 

Sean: I’m guessing I’ll get a similar answer for Shrapnel‘s ‘Planet Digest,’ which seems to have sidelined Touring the Stars?

Phil: I dunno if that was intentional. I think Touring the Stars is just more of a production backlog. As far as I’m aware, I don’t think the Touring the Stars series has been cancelled. I don’t think Shrapnel has really killed it because they’re completely different formats. Whereas Touring the Stars is a very in-depth deep dive into it, where you get all the stats and all the history. I think they have planetary maps in them, too, for doing the planetary conquest type stuff. There’s so much more that goes into it than just a three or four-page Shrapnel entry. 

In fact, I can’t remember offhand what planet it was, but the author who wrote that was also working on a Touring the Stars for that and actually used the Shrapnel entry as a baseline and then greatly expanded it from there. So it’s more like the Shrapnel entry can get people interested and be like, “Maybe I want to set a feature campaign here,” and then the Touring the Stars is the full package if you want to dig even deeper. They just kind of scratch two completely different itches.

Sean: You also publish campaign scenarios in Shrapnel, and I’ve seen most of ’em come from Eric Salzman. He’s really big on them, huh?

Phil: Yeah. Well, the thing about choosing scenarios from Shrapnel is I get a whole bunch of people pitch me things, and I basically go through and choose the one that I think either might fit the issue’s theme a little more (if it has a theme), or a scenario that I really want to sit down and play or I think would be really fun. And it just so happens that a lot of the scenarios that fit that bill were written by Eric. I’m not biased toward him or anything. When someone gives me a good piece of content, I am all for it.

Sean: But you will accept scenarios from other authors?

Phil: Oh yeah.

Sean: Would you accept it as a random submission? Or is the process always to make sure you can write a short story first to get published in Shrapnel, and then you can get access to these other article series?

Phil: Honestly, most of the people that are in my pool for writing game content stuff are ones that have either shown me that they have writing chops, or they already work on BattleTech sourcebooks, or—this happens a lot—members of the Catalyst Demo Team. They know BattleTech; they actually know the game. They run it in their local stores a lot. I know that they’re very competent in game writing, and so I’ll get a lot of pitches from them. 

By and large, the reason why the game content curation is a little separate from the short story submissions is that writing a short story and writing something for game-side material are very different skill sets. Sure, there’s some overlap because writing is writing, but it’s been my experience that a lot of times people need to be trained on how to write good game material. Not to say that a first-timer couldn’t write good game material, but there’s usually a little bit of nuance and finesse that goes into writing game material. 

I’ve actually had some people send me game material through the short story submission form, and I’ve read the submissions and gone, “Yeah, this is kind of why I don’t have this opened up to brand-new people.” I’ve talked to people at conventions, and they’ve expressed interest, or sometimes people have emailed me and said, “Hey, here’s a sample that I’ve written. What do you think of this?” There are a number of different avenues to get into the actual game writing side of things, but by and large, it’s a very personal, connection-based rather than “Here’s something in a submission pile,” if that makes any sense.

Sean: Shrapnel is the official BattleTech magazine, but there are some unofficial BattleTech magazines out there, such as Pirate Point and Override, just to name two off the top of my head. Have you read any of these publications?

Phil: I have not, and I don’t know if I would be allowed to. When it comes to unofficial things, that’s always a really weird grey area for people who work on properties in an official capacity.

I always think back to this lawsuit where a fan who submitted a story to a fanzine sued the author, claiming that the author had stolen this person’s story idea from the fanzine and incorporated it into a future novel in her series. This case got dragged through the courts, and made the author’s health suffer. That sort of precedent of fans suing authors, it’s a legal matter that we try not to get into. 

So if you’re having something that’s unofficial stuff, I can’t really read. Not to say that anyone would possibly want to sue, but it’s just one of the things we have to sort of cover our rear end on. Same reason why I can’t really read BattleTech fan fiction.

Sean: That’s a fair point. I recall one story of a particular BattleTech person who somehow got their fan idea published on the official BattleTech site at one point, and it did result in an actual lawsuit. I forgot if this was back during the FASA days or if it was the WizKids days.

Phil: You don’t have to couch it. I mean, I’m not going to name names either, but…

Sean: It’s on Sarna.

Phil: I think earlier this year at a convention, someone sort of surreptitiously put one of the fanzines in our fiction bookshelf, covering over one of the novels, and I was just like, what? I did sort of page through it, just because I wanted to see what they did with it. But no, I didn’t actually read any of it. 

I guess my advice to people who send stuff to those sorts of fanzines is, if you want to be officially published, send me an actual submission. I will read it. That’s a far better way to get my attention than to put something in a fanzine.

Not disparaging fanzines at all—I think they’re great, I’m glad they exist. But if you want to go official, go to the official submission portal.

Courtesy of Eldoniousrex

Sean: One of the key staples of any ongoing periodical, such as Shrapnel, is the classic advice column. Why doesn’t Shrapnel have a BattleTech advice columnist? And could I be that columnist? My rates are very reasonable.

Phil: When you say advice columnist, are you talking about an in-universe character writing an advice column or a real-life where it’s like you write it and be like, “Every time I put down ’Mech X on the board, every person I play with immediately kills it. They hate it so much. How can I make people stop hating this ’Mech?”

Sean: Could be either. I think both would work really well.

Phil: Honestly, the only reason why I haven’t is that no one has pitched that idea before. 

Sean: Well, here I am pitching it.

Phil: Should I put you on my official pitch list? 

Sean: Sure! I’m not sure I would always be the best person to answer the question, though. If it’s a rules-related question, you should probably turn to a real rules expert, of which I am not. But if it’s an in-universe character, I could totally do that.

Let’s move on quickly to the next question. How has Sarna aided in ensuring that submissions are of a tolerable quality, and what sorts of things could Sarna improve upon? We know Sarna isn’t perfect, and maybe that has contributed to a mix-up here or there.

Phil: The first half of that question, I’m not really quite sure how to answer. I know pretty much our entire writing team uses Sarna on a regular basis. I always encourage people to check the citations, check the actual sources. Sarna is great for starting the research, where you can read a thing and get the nuggets of an idea, and then you go to the citation, and then the actual source, and you get even more information that’s sometimes more detailed. 

We all use it in some capacity or another, so it is definitely invaluable to our process. But as far as what people who submit stories, I honestly don’t really know. I would assume that they use it.

I should segue into the second half of the question. I’ve seen little telltales that tell me that they’ve used Sarna in their research. One of the telltales I started noticing maybe a year ago, a lot of submissions that I was getting were having the planet name in the epigraph—the four-ish line thing that starts every single story and most scenes—would have a Roman numeral at the end of it. And I was like, okay, that’s weird. A lot of times, I’m reading about planets where I know this planet, and I’ve literally never seen it with an actual Roman numeral next to it. 

We’re sorry about Luthien IV!

Instead of just saying, “Luthien, Draconis Combine,” it said “Luthien IV,” or whatever it was. And I was just like, that’s weird. Delete those two Roman numerals, and then go to another story, and that one’s fine. And I’ll go to another story and be like, huh, why does this have a Roman numeral at the end of this one, too? That’s kind of weird. 

So I was noticing this pattern where I was like, these shouldn’t really have Roman numerals on them. Now, granted, there are some that very famously have Roman numerals, for example, Solaris VII. But usually, if you look at the map, you’ll see just Solaris as the actual name. But a lot of people reference Solaris VII because there are multiple inhabited planets in the Solaris system, so people use the VII to say, “Hey, I’m talking about the one where they have all the arena fights and not Solaris IV, the mining planet.” 

In that case, when the actual planet name or specific planet designation is important, then that’s when you see the Roman numerals. But I was getting these weird planets that I’ve literally never seen Roman numerals for, and it’s not a system that was canonised as having multiple planets in the system. 

And I was like, okay, that’s kind of weird. So then I went to Sarna, and I went to like, okay, huh. This page has a Roman numeral on it. Okay, interesting. And then I went to another one, and I was like, huh, this page has a Roman numeral on it too. That’s interesting. I was noticing this pattern. I know in the last number of years, Sarna has done a revamp of all the planet pages that added so much more detail, which is great. But then I was like, there’s got to be this pattern of people looking at the map on Sarna and then saying, “This Sarna page says that it’s this planet name with the Roman numeral, even though it’s the only inhabited planet in the system.” 

I guess that’s just a case of what they call “cite-osis”—like cytosis for citations—but which is a phenomenon that happened a couple of times. The most prominent example of it was the first Chancellor of the Capellan Confederation. His wife’s name was never actually mentioned in any of the sourcebooks, and then at one point, the wife was named in a sourcebook because the author of that particular piece had gone to the Sarna article about this individual and saw his wife’s name was this, but there wasn’t any citation for that. It sort of became this internal feedback loop of someone at some point had written in an article something that didn’t have a citation, and that was not necessarily accurate, but it ended up becoming accurate because someone referenced that and was like, this has to be true. Instead of verifying it against actual published material, they went ahead and canonised that without realising that it was not accurate. 

So that’s basically what cite-osis is, where something that was not canon becomes canon because of an inaccuracy in a wiki article. Every single time I’ve come across incorrect things in articles before, I usually try to correct them there when I can, or I’ll ping someone and be like, “Hey, can someone take care of this?” I try to limit that as much as I can whenever I see it, but examples that big are not really very common.

Sean: Well, that’s good!

Phil: It is one of the potential dangers of working with a wiki, but again, it’s kind of minimal. It’s just one of those weird little factoids. 

Sean: That seems like a relatively small thing, although we’re sorry about the planet thing. I think that was just standardization that went amok.

Phil: I understand the rationale for it, and I applaud the initiative, but it was just one of those things that, from a development editorial standpoint, it kind of made us stop and go, “Well, now we’re not sure if a planet needs to have Roman numerals or not.” 

I applaud the initiative, I understand why it was done, but things happen. I’m not mad about it. It was just funny that I could sort of put the puzzle pieces together and figure it out.

Sean: Well, if that comes up again, let me know, and we’ll look into it. 

Shrapnel has accepted stories so far, but it doesn’t accept art submissions. Will Shrapnel ever get into the business of publishing art?

Phil: We did an experiment with fan art in Issue 3, and I won’t really bore you with the details of that, but I kind of ran into some hurdles with the behind-the-scenes side of things. Essentially, anything we publish in Shrapnel has to be completely owned, so we have to basically buy art from people. And some people were like, “I mean, I don’t want to sell this. I want to give it to you.” And we’re like, “That’s not how legality works! We literally have to send you a contract, you have to sign it, we have to pay you for it, and it becomes the property of Topps, who owns the BattleTech IP.”  There were far too many hoops to jump through to actually make that work. 

We like the idea of doing it, just the hurdles of actually making that work are kind of infeasible, if that makes any sense. But all the art that we feature in Shrapnel goes through a lengthy process where we write art notes for the pieces, we get sketches, we get finishes, we get pre-final, and we get the Art Director’s art direction. It is a whole professional, full-production process. With submitted art, we can’t really have any control over that sort of thing. It’s just a matter of legal rights and production logistics, essentially.

Sean: And finally, the most important question for you today: what does the future of Shrapnel hold?

Phil: Issue 23 is coming out in December. That’s got a lot of fun stuff in it. With every issue that comes out in December, I try to put a little bit of holiday content in it, whether it’s real-world holiday stuff or fake BattleTech holiday stuff. Issue 3 was all about Founding Day, which is a very, very important holiday for the Clans, for example. That also happens to fall in December, so that kind of worked out. I got some fun holiday-related stuff in that issue. 

Then on the horizon, there’s the big number 25 milestone. We’re making that a double-size issue. We got some of our veteran big gun heavy-hitters coming out swinging for that one. And then from there, we will keep making Shrapnel for as long as you guys want it.

Sean: We’ll probably want it forever, so it’s going to be a long time.

Phil: I went to, what, three conventions this year? At least three. And almost every single convention, I have multiple people just chatting around our fiction shelves, talking about Shrapnel, and they’re just shaking my hand and saying, “I love Shrapnel. It’s one of my favourite things. I’m always happy to crack it open every three months. Keep doing what you’re doing.” And I’m like, “I plan on it.”

Sean: All right! Nobody gets out of these interviews without doing a couple of fun questions. The first one from the Sarna Discord, and this is a very short question: “More Ludwig when Phil?”

Phil: That’s a very good question. I’m not sure how to answer that.

Sean: Fair enough. Next question, also from the Sarna Discord: which sci-fi universe do you think would be the best matchup for BattleTech in a versus battle?

Phil: In a versus battle? Oh goodness. You’re just trying to make me think really hard. I probably have to say Starship Troopers. In terms of military technology and just general aesthetics, probably leaning more toward the Starship Troopers movie, and then also the animated series that they did, where they have more of the battle armour and stuff. 

Sean: And the dropships, yeah.

Phil: I think that would be a really cool mashup. Then we could have BattleMechs and Elementals and mobile infantry and DropShips and their battle armor versus bugs. That’d be cool.

Sean: And lastly, what was the most unintentionally hilarious error that you had to correct while editing a story?

Phil: There’ve been a couple of typos that were accidental swear words. I’m obviously not going to say what they were, but yeah. I don’t think this was in Shrapnel per se, but it was definitely in something BattleTech-related. The typo said “Sex Fox” instead of Sea Fox. I was just like, “I can see how I happened because the X is very close to  A on the keyboard. I literally screenshotted that and sent that to the group chat that I have with John, Craig Reed, and Jason Hansa, and was like, “Okay, this is probably one of the best typos I’ve ever seen.”

Sean: Right on. Well, that’s everything I have for you. Thank you so much for answering questions about Shrapnel, about your upcoming works, and I’m looking forward to seeing that December issue!

Phil: It’s coming along. It should be done here in a few days.

Sean: Excellent. Thanks so much. Take care.

Phil: Yeah, thanks.

Thanks again to Phil A. Lee for chatting with us about Shrapnel! A very special Shrapnel Issue 23 is available now on Catalyst’s store and wherever good books are sold.

And as always, MechWarriors: Stay Syrupy.