Keeping BattleTech Consistent – An Interview Eric Salzman, Fact-Check Director At CGL

The year of BattleTech‘s 40th anniversary continues with yet another interview with brand stewards Catalyst Game Labs. This time we managed to snag Eric Salzman, a longtime fan who broke into writing and then ascended to become BattleTech‘s Fact-Check Director. This guy knows more about the universe than I ever will, which is why he’s in charge of keeping everyone else consistent with BattleTech‘s established lore—something we here at Sarna can certainly appreciate.

If you think you’re the “well actually” guy at your gaming table, then this interview is for you. And at the end, you can find out how to maintain the lore of the entire BattleTech community by joining the Fact-Check team. Enjoy.

Sean Murray (Sarna): Hi Eric, thanks for agreeing to sit down and chat with me tonight about your work writing for BattleTech and being the official Fact-Check Director for the BattleTech universe.

Eric “Mendrugo” Salzman (Catalyst Game Labs): Thank you for having me. It’s an honor to be interviewed for Sarna. I’ve contributed many articles to it. When I’m looking something up, it’s often the first place we go, especially because well-written articles have bibliographies, and so that can save time going back to, you know, figuring out which original source we need to go to to find the detailed account.

Sean: Let’s start us off with what I ask pretty much everyone we interview: what is your BattleTech journey? When did you get into BattleTech? How’d you get started writing for BattleTech? How’d you wind up as the lead fact-checker for BattleTech and writer for so much of BattleTech‘s modern material?

Eric: Okay, well, so how did I get into Battletech? That would be 1987. I got a stack of video game boxes for my birthday and included in them was BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks’ Inception for the Amiga, and you know the other ones just sort of sat to the side and gathered dust while I zipped all over Chara searching for that damn holodisc. I was talking so much about mecha—which is how the game referred to things—over the next few weeks that my dad asked me, “So is this game set in Saudi Arabia?”

Sean: No, not quite.

Eric: So I finished the game, found the secret chamber with the hidden ‘Mech, sent the card and five bucks away to Infocom, and got back the Crescent Hawk LAM. So that was my first BattleTech miniature. 

We lived out in the Hinterlands, about a two-hour drive from Albuquerque, but we’d go down there every other weekend, on shopping trips and whatnot. And we’d go to the mall saying, “Alright, everyone, meet back in two hours.” I’d just make a beeline for Walden Books and spend the time flipping through the game books, and my attention kept going over to the technical readouts. And so the first things that I bought, even before the rulebooks of actually how to play the game, were the technical readouts. Little stories on the side, the pictures, the action—it was only later I realized that Renegade Legion wasn’t part of the same universe. So, then I just started getting more into it, picking up the other products, the novels, and other stuff like that. My main game store was in Albuquerque, a place called War Games West. 

And then how I got started writing for BattleTech. So, initially, pretty minor. When they still had BattleCorps as a going operation, they said, “Hey, we’re open to fan submissions. Send in your scenario ideas, your unit profiles, whatever.” So I wrote a scenario and it got published, Conquer the Kremlin, and I got a unit profile written, the Iron Land Wildcatters. I tooled around with some ideas for fiction but never actually got around to submitting anything, and then BattleCorps, you know, shut down.

Then in summer of 2021, I got an email from Johannes Heidler. He’s the person behind the Recognition Guides and the Technical Readouts, lead developer on those. And so he emailed and said, “Hey, uh, we’ve got an awful lot of Kickstarter people that we’re trying to make into notable pilots. Would you be willing to try to take the notes and turn them into a notable pilot entry?” And they liked the first one that I did, and kept sending me more, and then started sending me other things. “Hey, are you up for doing this? Are you up for doing that?” And my answer is pretty much always yes. I’ve just been, you know, making pitches ever since and they keep saying yes to a number of them.

And then, how did I end up as the lead fact-checker? So FanPro put out a call for demonstration agents, in-store demo agents, in 2001. So I filled out the application, signed up, and became FanPro Commando Number 8 and did in-store demonstrations in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and other places. Bubonicon in Albuquerque, I ran Monte Diablo, and I ran the Trial of Retribution. But then I got a job working for the U. S. Department of State as a Foreign Service Officer, which involved moving overseas to countries that, in most cases, had no gaming culture, no gaming stores.

So they started noticing that I hadn’t run any demos recently and said, “Alright, you’re no longer a FanPro commando. But we will shift you over to our playtesting group.” So when new scenarios and other stuff like that came out, I was able to look them over and say, “Okay, hold on, um, these tanks are supposed to cross from the left to the right. How are they going to get across that three-level deep river in the middle?” That or, “Hey, when this guy goes insane, there doesn’t seem to be a mechanism for turning it back off. Was that intended?” That sort of thing. I sort of stayed on the radar as basically being this voice over the internet from abroad giving input on scenarios and other things.

The next thing that happened was around 2002. I learned how to do database programming, and I decided to try to create a searchable database of BattleTech content. I believe you’re familiar with that urge. 

Sean: Yeah, we may not know something about that. 

Eric: I was trying to basically create an interface with all the information on planets and units circa 3025 to support an online campaign. I wanted to try to model the BattleTech universe in as much detail as I could. So I ended up with this utterly unwieldy 50-gigabyte database full of all this stuff that then basically talks to a website interface. You could move your unit around the planet and then load it on board a DropShip and sail it up to your JumpShip, dock there, and then you could switch to a different map and start jumping it around to different planets, land back down, give it orders to attack, all this other stuff.

Sean: It sounds like you made a video game.

Eric: Yes, which is not allowed under the Microsoft license. Also, it turns out that the way that I’d structured it—because people would be inputting their orders simultaneously—whoever’s going on the attack has the supreme advantage, because the guy being attacked has no idea, and his units just sort of stand there and got pummeled with no orders because they didn’t know it was coming.

Sean: Okay, so not the best game, but still. 

Eric: There’s some structural things that sort of fell apart and it never actually launched. But, I did end up basically scouring through every source that I could find, trying to get all the planetary data, all the unit data. Sourcebooks had a lot of stuff, but then, authors had invented new things and new elements in short stories and novels, and more was coming out all the time.

So I was sort of constantly going through every piece of fiction I could get my hands on and just sort of giving it a datamine. As a result, when they were looking for people doing fact-checking, I had the universe sort of burned into my brain. And I also had this searchable database of all of this information on at least the planets and a lot of the units. I was able to very quickly turn things around and say oh wait, no, that’s not right. 

When I went overseas, I had to essentially limit my weight on all my household effects, and books take up a lot of poundage. So, I did what I could through BattleCorps, and then later through the online store, to make everything digital. They started making available all of the old materials, at least most of them, through PDFs that were optical, OCR’d and searchable, and the new stuff comes out in PDFs. So I was able to have most of my library available like that. And then I went on a bit of an eBay scavenger hunt trying to gather together all of the other materials that I didn’t have, including the old FASA source books, magazines, and other stuff like that, and then scanned those in. I ended up with basically a pretty complete BattleTech collection, all digital, and that way I could just store it in the cloud and leave my other stuff in long-term storage back in the States.

As a result, when I was doing fact-checking, a task would come out, and I just had to do a keyword search on my library, and then immediately come up with a number of hits. Of course, that doesn’t really help if we’re searching for information on the planet Anywhere; a lot of false positives there.

When they decided to move to a new online platform, to move the Fact-Check team from just a loose group of volunteers helping out to a group that had enough direction and scheduling so that they could build it into the production process, they needed someone to step up for Fact-Check Director. It doesn’t mean that I’m any more important than any of the other fact-checkers, it just means that I do the paperwork on the back end in terms of scheduling. 

Sean: So this database, is this something that you use now in your fact-checking, or has it sort of grown into something else now?

Eric:  Oh, well, the Access database, that’s old and outmoded. I haven’t updated it since about 2011. Back then, if you wanted to keyword search a PDF, it took something like six to ten minutes to go through a single file. So I’d start a text search running on the PDF library and then go off and do something else, and come back and see if it was finished.

Then the search tools got massive upgrades in the operating systems. Now you can use Google search tools right in your folders. We have everything uploaded to a Google Drive that all of the fact-checkers are able to access so we can just put in a keyword there and it comes back with all of the files that it got hits on. It’s a great resource. Basically, plug and play. Now, you get a lot of false hits too, so one of the key things for the fact-checkers is knowing the thing that we’re looking at a huge number of search results, and you’re able to pick out which one of those is the real source of the information you need and not just the name of your planet on a map.

Sean: You have also done a lot of writing besides the fact-checking. But before we move on to the next question, which is all-important, do you have anything that you’ve written that really stands out as a personal favorite? 

Eric: Let’s see. In terms of the silliness of the title, I think The Great UrbanMech Uprising is up there.

Sean: That’s a good one. 

Eric: But doing Tamar Rising, that was sort of the first major sourcebook that I had a hand in. I think, in terms of the articles for Shrapnel, I really enjoyed Ascending the Pecking Order, which is a look into the culture of Clan Snow Raven.

Sean: Alright, let’s move on to the truly important question. I’ve interviewed both Brent and Ray, and they both said that everyone has a list of ‘Mechs they want to see redesigned. I see you’ve got quite a few ‘Mechs you’ve helped redesign in the Recognition Guides. Which one of those is your favorite? And are there any ‘Mechs that you’d still like to see redesigned that haven’t yet?

Eric: I’m probably one of the least consistent BattleTech players out there because I tend to go with stuff that works really well if I get lucky. And if I don’t the other players just sort of stand there with their jaws on the floor as I rip myself apart and send my legs flying in different directions. When I did the entries for the Recognition Guides, Johannes was generous enough to let me design at least one variant for each of the ones that I did.

Now most of those, they went through. A Flea design that I proposed was shot down. I tried to put in one with Heavy Lasers and Mechanical Jump Boosters. Primarily just so I could have a Flea go boing, boing, boing. Yeah, they’re absolutely terrible, utterly uncompetitive, and it would have been absolutely ridiculous, which is my favorite mode of play. But it was shot down in favor of a variant that anyone would actually see use. 

One of my favorite design models is a fast ‘Mech with just an unbelievable number of small weapons. And the idea is they’re backstabbers; you zip them in, get behind somebody, light them up, and just completely melt their backside off, touch off all of their ammo, crit their engines, etc. I got two of those into the Recognition Guides; the Linebacker Alt. Config I, and the Hellion Alt. Config P, which has been described as a mobile war crime.

I fielded both of these during Masters and Minions at GenCon last year (my first on the Masters side of the table). Everyone else fielded assault ‘Mechs, but after the first high-speed pass unloading a storm of energetic death at their backsides, the other team all forted up and circled the wagons, while my tiny Hellion circled, Jaws music playing. And then of course I failed my MASC role and ripped my own legs off. That was the end of me, but while it lasted, it was a lot of fun. 

In terms of redesign, probably for the Linebacker I, I would rip out the Machine Gun Arrays and just put more machine guns in there, because without the arrays, you’d be able to run those at high speed with the optional rule, and then just completely end whoever you got behind with an absolute storm of lead. The Hellion did a lot better than the Linebacker because those machine gun arrays are just terrible.

Sean: Let’s get into your current role as Fact-Check Director. What exactly is the process for fact-checking materials? I’m sure a lot of it you can just do based on memory, but do you have any special tools or anything internal that helps you make sure everything is okay lore-wise?

Eric: So essentially, step one is we’ve got a great crew of people together who all have a lot of encyclopedic knowledge about the universe. And the key thing is that we all have encyclopedic knowledge about different areas of the universe. So stuff that I will completely miss and gloss over, other fact-checkers are going to get, and so it’s great to have multiple sets of eyes on these products.

So essentially what we do is that a developer will say, “Okay, we finished the writing process,” now it goes over to Fact-Check. They send it to me, I put it on our schedule, I tell our guys, “Okay, we’ve got this thing, sign up if you’re available,” and then they announce, “Okay, I’m available, let me have it.” I set a deadline for them and send them the files. They look it over, they make comments on it. And it’s all shared things, so we’re able to see each other’s comments. We do a shared cloud workspace, so we can have back and forths on this source says this, this source says that.

And we all have access to the online database of all of the canon resource material so that if someone needs to do a check on something, they can just dive right into the shared drive and go take a look and do keyword searches. Then once we have everybody’s comments in, I let the initial developer know the Fact-Check’s done, and here are the files back. They take a look, they say, “Alright, I don’t quite understand what you need on this one, can I have more clarity,” there’s some back and forth, just to make sure that they understand what our guys are saying. We get all that sorted out, and then it moves on to the editing and layout process, or it goes back to the author if they need to fix something.

In some cases, authors who are new to the setting write using tropes that are from other settings, and we have to correct them. “Okay, it doesn’t work like that in BattleTech. This is how you would change it to work.” 

Our goal is not to shut down anything. I hate hearing anyone say Fact-Check killed this story. This may have been the case before I joined, but it certainly hasn’t been the case while I’ve been a fact-checker. Our goal is not to kill your story. Our goal is to recommend options for keeping your story as intact as possible, while also making it fit into the universe.

Sean: So I take it before you, then there may have been some awful, awful fact-checkers who just completely kiboshed a story because it just didn’t work? 

Eric: No, no, but they didn’t have the resources. They didn’t have an online database. If you’re flipping through your paper books, the amount of time required is just exponentially greater. The previous fact-checkers were an absolutely fantastic group of people, but they didn’t have the technology we have. We are living in a golden age for this sort of thing. 

Sean: Well, that sort of leads into my next question. Catalyst has quite a few authors right now. It used to just be four or five core authors that would move the universe forward and now it seems like there’s quite a bit more. How does Catalyst collaborate with all these authors and still keep everything straight while everything’s in production? What tools does the Fact-Check team provide these authors to help keep everything consistent? 

Eric: Well, basically there are, there are chat functions on our back-end. Uh, I think we’re using Basecamp 3 now these days, and I think there’s also a contributor’s Discord. There are various ways that the contributors, the writers, and the freelancers can get a hold of Fact-Check. If they’ve got a question about something, they can just shout it out and say, “Hey, Fact-Check, I got a question for you on something.” And I can just immediately do the keyword searches on the library and come up with the information they’re looking for. That way they’re in line with canon from the beginning because we’re basically a research department for them. 

With the online collaboration stuff, they can have a chance to ask us sort of anything that they’re interested in. They’re working on a story idea or they’re writing something out, and we can just basically help them and do a sniff test. 

But the way that this is all being held together is that Aaron and Ray, and the other guys at the upper levels, they come up with sort of the broad story ideas, the major plot beats, and where things are going for the next X period. Then they communicate that out to their writers saying, “Okay, so here is everything that’s happening for the next X years. When you are making pitches, please consider this timeline of events and make sure that what you’re pitching will fit into it.” 

Now, you can pitch other stuff that has nothing to do with all this other stuff on the inside but don’t contradict anything of what’s going together. That’s how they keep it all together because they have lots of transparency. They inform the people who are doing the main writing of where they’re going so that people don’t go off on their own tangents at a 90-degree angle. That keeps them crazy busy, but we’re really grateful to them for doing that.

And then Fact-Check, a lot of our work is with people who write for Shrapnel. They of course didn’t have that briefing of where things were going. This is where we often do a lot more ripping and tearing because it’s not aligned with where the universe was going. We’re not killing the story though, we are just basically reshaping it to make sure that it’s in alignment with where the universe and the storyline are going. We sort of serve as some of the guardrails to keep things going in the right direction. Ray and Aaron do the big meta stuff, and then we catch the little things that slip through. 

Sean: Yeah, like accidentally killing the Black Thorns. 

Eric: You said back when there were just four or five authors, well, the thing is, it’s the technology. At the time, they were still writing stuff on typewriters and sending it in by mail to FASA.

Michael Stackpole came up with this great plot idea for the Blood of Kerensky trilogy. “Hey, what if the Draconis Combine put together this ‘Death to Mercenaries’ thing, got rid of all the mercenaries, and that makes it that much more impactful when the Wolf’s Dragoons and Kell Hounds come save Luthien?”

Great. But, nobody told Robert Charrette when he was writing Heir to the Dragon about any of this. And so, you know, Heir to the Dragon has a key plot point about Theodore Kurita hiring an army of mercenaries to roll back the War of 3039. And then nobody told Activision when they made MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries, where about one-third of the missions are for the Draconis Combine. Nobody told the author of Invading Clans when about a quarter of the worlds in the Draconis Combine that are attacked by the Smoke Jaguars are defended by mercenaries. 

Sean: I guess “Death to Mercenaries” was always more of a guideline than an actual rule.

Eric: If you look at all the early detailed stuff, you know, it’s a lot of great stuff. But it’s clearly siloed. Because that’s just the technology of the time. And it’s a much more cohesive whole now that everything is so interconnected. 

Sean: Almost like the internet is a good thing.

Eric: A lot of the credit for that goes to Josh Perian who handles a lot of the tech. I know him as Knightmare on the boards. He’s been the one that’s basically been getting all of this tech linked together and making us all interconnected. So huge kudos to him for dragging us kicking and screaming into the 21st century. 

Sean: Let’s move on to the next question. What’s the most fun you’ve had while finding a way to resolve an inconsistency between two or more canon sources? 

Eric: There’s a reason I brought up the Death to Mercenaries. As I outlined, it’s a 100 percent contradiction, because you’ve got this edict of 100 percent absolutely no mercenaries, they’ll be killed on sight, but this source, this source, this source, and this book say there are mercenaries all over the place.

And so, in a Shrapnel article, thanks to the fact that we now have Shrapnel where we can do things like this, I was able to write an article that essentially worked out, okay, so, Takashi hates mercenaries, doesn’t want there to be any mercenaries, and thinks there are no mercenaries.

However, Takashi also had a bit of a stroke, and he’s been sort of edged out by Theodore being the Gunji no Kanrei after the War of 3039. And the ISF, Subhash Indrahar, has a history of helping Theodore hide things from Takashi. So why don’t we just go ahead with, you know, “Yes, Takashi, oh, Death to Mercenaries, absolutely, 100 percent.”

Sean: That’s what I always assumed.

Eric: We’re able to basically look at the canon relationship between those two characters and find the perfect opportunity for being able to hold two diametrically opposed concepts at the same time.

Sean: It’s good that we can have BattleTech have these weird kinds of opposed positions that still get resolved. 

Eric: Yeah, well, I hate retconning anything. I hate looking at something and saying, oh, that’s absolutely impossible. I love looking at something like that and saying, oh, we have an absolute contradiction here.

But instead of going, no, that’s wrong, it didn’t happen that way, get rid of it, I like to go with the improv style of “yes and.” And trying to figure out how both versions can be at least partially correct. 

Sean: As the Fact-Check Director, in your experience, what is the most commonly believed or stated bit of BattleTech information that is actually incorrect?

Eric: Probably two things, and it both comes down to physics and economics. So the fusion engine explosions; it’s been acknowledged that, yes, the setting calls for really satisfying giant explosions. But the way that fusion works, if it’s breached, it just shuts it down. It doesn’t go kablooey. 

It’s been sort of rationalized that when the superheated plasma hits the outside air, there’s a momentary big flare and that’s what people refer to as the engine explosion, but it’s not actually a fusion overload. So, we have a number of cases where we have writers giving us, “and then the engine exploded,” and in Fact-Check, we say, well actually no, that’s not how fusion works. 

The second thing is, you get a number of planets described as a breadbasket world, or this planet imports all its food.

Like, huh, really? All one billion people just import all of their food? You look at how many JumpShips were described as they’re being active in 3025, DropShips and JumpShips said 2000 JumpShips for the entire Inner Sphere, and Mercenary’s Handbook 3055 brought that to 3000 JumpShips for the whole Inner Sphere.

And then the later core rulebook series said, “Oh yeah, that estimate was off by an order of magnitude.” So fine, 30,000 JumpShips for the entire Inner Sphere. If you’re trying to feed a billion people, you would have to dedicate that entire fleet times ten just to hauling gigatons of grain daily.

The math just does not work out on there being worlds that are absolutely barren that have anything more than a tiny population, and worlds that are huge farming worlds that end up supplying all of the worlds around them with grain. It’s just not enough throughput. So basically, when people describe that sort of thing, we have the fact-checkers saying, “Well, given the amount of DropShips available for that, they could supplement the local variety with stuff and bring in off-world exotic stuff, but you’re not going to be bringing in 10,000 DropShips a day full of grain in order to feed your populace.”

Sean: So a lot more hydroponic domes than we would have originally thought in BattleTech. 

Eric: Hehe, yeah. 

Sean: Recently announced for Catalyst’s 2024 plans is the Brush Wars revival. Brush Wars Volume One will be a reprint of Historical: Brush Wars, and Brush Wars Volume Two is going to be a reprint of Historical: Wars of the Republic Era. Is there anything else that fans can expect from these two reprints? Are they just going to be straight reprints, or is there going to be anything else added?

Eric: So I’m the co-developer on the Brush Wars revival along with Johannes Heidler. He’s really taking the lead on the reprint stuff.

I think for the most part it’s just a rebrand, instead of being Historical: Brush Wars it’s just going to be Brush Wars Volume One, Brush Wars Volume Two. That’s because, we are getting ready to bring out Brush Wars Volume Three, Brush Wars Volume Four, Brush Wars Volume Five, and so on and so forth.

Sean: Cool. That’s good to know. And I also hear that you’re helping out on ilKhan’s Eyes Only. That’s the book that’s going to be bringing forward the universe to see what mayhem is going to happen next. Now the Clan Wolf has taken Terra and is now the ilClan, is there anything else you can say about that book? Or are we going to have to wait for that to arrive in November for us to know anything about what’s going to happen next? 

Eric: I can’t give any details, otherwise the offers to keep writing will stop coming in, but I want to assure people that we’ve got a great writing team on this. Josh Perian, Aaron, and Ray gave us a great set of storylines to flesh out, and we’ve done our best to make sure that each faction gets their dues. Your favorite faction may not win all the time, but they’re going to be shown giving it a good effort. 

Sean: I like good effort. Well, speaking of good effort, how difficult was it to be capstoning the Dark Age era, and then lay the groundwork for the entire future of where BattleTech is going to go? Was this a monumental task, or easier than you expected? 

Eric: It wasn’t our task. As was noted in your interview with Ray and Aaron, they, along with Josh, broke the storyline down into the various components that need of what needed to happen and when.

And so we were given that outline saying, “All right, you need to have this happen, then this happens, this happens, this happens.” There’s a lot of freedom within all that to add some extra stuff, flesh things out, move things, and look at things from a different angle. But all of the big picture stuff of what’s going to happen from start to finish, that’s all been handed to us. The sourcebooks are essentially our chance to add drama to the events that happen, add drama, and add context. 

Our goal with this is to try to make sure that when people look at these events, they see battles that they are interested in replaying on their tabletop. They see characters they’re interested in maybe including in a role-playing game. That they feel like they have a lot of hooks that they can use to jump into the universe. 

Sean: Now a personal question for you, because you have been officially written into the universe as Sang-shao Eric Salzman of the Dynasty Guard. What happened to him? We know he was in command in 3063, and he was replaced by Jordan Weiss (who is the in-universe character for Jordan Weisman) in 3067, but there’s this blank spot in between. So what happened to Erik Salzman? Did he buy it, or did he get replaced?

Eric: Yeah, I was completely surprised when I was flipping through that book, got it home, and like, huh? What’s my name doing in here? 

So from postings on the original versions of the board that got wiped out in 2011, so you can’t go back and look at those records. But Camille Klein, who is one of the authors that was active from about 2000 to 2006, and she’s also the person who did the Trial of Refusal against the cartoon.

Yeah, so she was asked by Loren, according to what she wrote on the forums, saying, “Hey, I need some Capellan fans to put into this new field manual.” And so she went through rec.games.mecha and found a bunch of the pro-Capellan people who’d been mouthing off there about how great House Liao was back in the ‘90s and made us all commanders.

So I ended up as the head of the Dynasty Guard. If you look at the Sarna article, you can identify which fans were canonized that way. When I started posting on the boards, it was as Sang-shao Eric Salzman. And then the Field Manual: Updates comes along and I’m gone.

There’s no real explanation for what happened, but my XO, Jordan Weiss, is now the CO. There was a mention in Field Manual: Updates that the Dynasty Guard had clashed with the Blackwind Lancers on Highspire. And their commander was Warner Doles, who had gotten himself canonized when he basically won an online fan auction.

And so I said, “Oh no, Warner killed me!” And then Warner wrote this big long posting saying, “Yep, yep, we defeated you. Dragged you back to New Avalon in chains, and put you in a prison, And then the prison was crashed into by some ‘Mechs during the fighting in 3067, during the Civil War, and the burning prison collapsed and killed him.”

My response was, “So wait, his last sight was of New Avalon in flames? Yep, that’s how he would have wanted to go out.”

Sean: That’s looking on the bright side, I guess. 

Eric: Well, that’s not necessarily canon, but basically that’s what was a bit of back and forth on the board. 

Sean: Well, it works for me. Last question for your writing chops. Are there any characters that you’ve written that you were surprised with how much readers responded to them, either positively or negatively? 

Eric: Well, most of the stuff that I’ve written really hasn’t been characters that get a huge amount of page time or character development. These are more like notable pilots. I did a bunch of the Legends entries. There’ll be a bunch more of my stuff in Legends 2, or I’ve done things in Shrapnel articles. So, not a lot of my characters have had enough page time to really have their personalities come out, or for people to react to them one way or the other.

I think the character that got the strongest reaction was Keith Langenhaas in Tamar Rising. But that’s mostly because his appearance was a punchline in the Callandre Kell sidebar, and people online seemed to like the comedy of the situation. It’s like, “Oh yeah, your beloved is back. Jules? Ha! Oh god, not even.”

And then, uh, I think my favorite notable pilot write-up was in the Wolverine entry in the Recognition Guide Volume 18. Basically this Canopian pilot’s out on the rim. Clans show up for the first time, surprising everyone. Rest of his unit scrambles to go die at their hands. He turns around, goes to the ComStar station, hacks the HPG, has it send a message off into deep space, and then blows up his Wolverine and disappears. 

Sean: That’s probably what I would’ve done.

Eric: Leave people scratching their heads. But I’ve got a few upcoming characters that do get some more page time and get more fleshed out. I’m hoping that people connect with Julian of the Steel Vipers and with Zephan of the Watch. 

Sean: Well, we have something to look forward to there. Okay, that’s it for the serious questions, now onto the fun surprise questions. Who’s the worst for trying to sneak references or other jokes into sourcebooks?

Eric: I don’t know about who’s the worst. Um, I’m guilty of that if you go through Tamar Rising. I had that giant library of all sorts of old semi-canon stuff, the comic books, the video games, and anywhere that I saw an opportunity to take stuff. ‘Cause the official policy is that, “Oh yeah, we recognize that these things are out there, but unless they actually get written into a sourcebook, they’re not canon, they’re apocryphal.” Like, oh, so until they get written into a sourcebook…

Sean: Well, there’s a solution here.

Eric:  We also like to try to solve a lot of the mysteries of some of the early installment weirdness. You know Decision at Thunder Rift, they mentioned the Erit Cluster. That never appeared on any maps, and we’re looking, it’s like, where the hell is this thing? It’s between Trellwan and the Periphery. It’s in a star cluster. There are no star clusters marked on the map there, but one could be hidden in the Dark Nebula. Got it, the Erit Cluster is in the Dark Nebula. 

Or like Duke Ricol‘s aide reminiscing about the beautiful deserts of Chekaar, another planet that never showed up on the maps, and so we made it a secondary system in Rodigo. That sort of thing.

But yeah, there are a number of characters and events from the video games, and I have to admit, I may have done some of that again for ilKhan’s Eyes Only. Keep your eyes out for some Easter eggs. 

Sean: Alright, next up, uh, you’re one of the few people who has written about the Canopian Pleasure Circuses—I refer to your article in Shrapnel Issue 8. Let’s assume Clan Sea Fox, or Diamond Shark, is attempting to exploit the market currently served by Canopian Pleasure Circuses. Given how the Clans tend to dial everything up to eleven, what alternate services do you think Clan Sea Fox would offer to out-compete the Canopians?

Eric: Well, that’s the interesting thing. If you look into Clan sexuality, they view it more as companionship with a friend, so it’s not this taboo type of thing. According to Warriors of Kerensky, anybody who wants to, regardless of caste, can just walk up to another person and say, “Hey, I like how you look. Do you want a couple?” So the Sea Foxes would probably be aghast at the idea of spending hard credits, or Fox credits, or any sort of resources on something when they can just walk over to somebody and say, “Hey you want it?” 

The Canopians put on a whole show about it, with all of the exotic mystery and whatnot, and the Sea Foxes are a trifle more straightforward than that. Although as I noted in that one article, you can get the, uh, full Clan experience, the full Bondsman experience aboard some of those pleasure circuses. I don’t think the Sea Foxes are temperamentally suited to, uh, compete with the Canupians on that level.

Sean: Fair. Next question, in keeping up with the Clan theme: who would win in a five-on-five basketball game between Clan Elementals or Manei Domini cyborgs?

Eric: It depends on the kind of cyborg. I mean, if you’re talking about the succubus class ones that are basically just the pheromone injectors, they’re not going to be doing too many high jumps. The Elementals are certainly going to do fine. They’re really into sports, although not entirely sure about basketball. They’re built for football, rugby, lacrosse, and that sort of thing. You know, super muscular, super huge, and also super agile, they do just fine. 

For the Manei Domini guys, I’m guessing the metal weighs a lot more than the meat, so they’d probably have problems. Unless they’ve got some mechanical jump boosters in there… It really just depends on what attachments they’ve got, honestly.

Sean: I’m always rooting for the Elementals, but that’s just me. Last question. If you’ve been following our previous interviews, there’s a hypothetical soccer match between Ray’s team of Writing Rascals, as I think we’re going to call them, and Brent’s team of Artist All-Stars. 

Neither of them picked you for their side, but fortunately, this makes you and the Fact-Check team the perfect set of referees for this glorious battle. So the question is: which side do you think will get more red cards? Ray’s Writing Rascals or Brent’s Artist All-Stars?

Eric: Let’s see. Well, I would say there have probably been more canonicity issues that require correcting in the writing than in the art. Although there have been some famous flubs in the art over the years, such as one that Johannes pointed out to me. 

There’s a great, full body, full illustration of an Awesome. Now what are Awesomes known for having as their weapons? 

Sean: PPCs. 

Eric: Right. So this illustration shows an Awesome with shells ejecting from its left PPC. 

Sean: I don’t know, is there an Awesome variant with an autocannon?

Eric: Not canonically.

Sean: That’s unfortunate. Alright, so Brent gets more red cards?

It’s not an Awesome with an autocannon, but it IS a Warhammer with an LRM launcher.

Eric: No, no, I’d say the writers get more red cards just because they put out a lot more materials, a lot more detail, and so we work with them a lot more in terms of correcting stuff. We generally don’t get art sent to us for double checks, and in the modern era, we haven’t seen any art that has gone wrong like that. That was an old black-and-white illustration from the FASA era. 

Sean: Well, sorry Ray, you’re getting more red cards, but that doesn’t mean you’ve lost yet.

Okay, that’s everything I had for the interview. Was there anything you wanted to shout out or anything else you wanted to talk about for Sarna’s readers? 

Eric: Yeah, I just want to say, Sarna’s been a fantastic resource. I’ve really enjoyed contributing to it. One of the biggest things that I did was I actually went through and transcribed all video games up through MechWarrior 4 by watching YouTube Let’s Play videos. 

Sean: Wow! 

Eric: So if you ever want to read through all of the dialogue or text from anything from, Crescent Hawks’ Inception all the way up to MechWarrior 4. I have MechWarrior 5, but I have not actually found time to play it. 

Just like when I was doing fiction reviews on the main site, if you go to the novels and sourcebook reviews, pinned at the top is a master list of all of the fiction, and I keep that up to date with it broken out scene-by-scene in chronological order. And that’s also another good research tool to try to figure out what else is happening around me when I’m setting the story.

I used to post an in-depth deep-dive review on a scene, and I just haven’t had time to do that because, you know, Ray and Aaron keep on giving me more stuff to write. 

Sean: Fair enough. That’s good though, because I’m personally a fan of your work and I’m looking forward to seeing more of it in 2024.

Eric: Yep. More is coming as soon as I keep writing. And I also want to thank Aaron and Ray for greenlighting my April 1st project. 

Sean: Yes, they did mention that. I don’t know what that is. They kept their cards fairly close to their chest, but Aaron said that it was something that he approved begrudgingly. 

Not sure why this Griffin has a ladder in its leg…

Eric: Yeah, it’s probably not for everybody, but I just had a great idea. I thought, hey, I’m going to submit this to Shrapnel, put it on the slush pile. And then I saw the April 1st thing come out last year I’m like, “Hey, wait a minute. This would actually make a pretty good April Fools thing.” this is why we said on April 2nd I got this call.

Sean: Well, everybody should look forward to April 1st then. Thanks so much for sitting down to chat with me. It was fascinating to learn how everything works with making sure things stay on the rails for new products as they come out, and I’m sure it’s going to be a fascinating read for people.

Eric: Yep, shout out to my Fact-Check crew. Oh, and one other thing that if any of your readers think, “Hey, I know everything about the BattleTech universe, and I keep seeing stuff in the finished projects that I would have caught.” We do have an application process. If you want to become a fact-checker, we have a test, we have an evaluation. So, if you’re really interested in doing research and trying to catch errors and improve the overall quality of the product, you can reach out to me [via email here], and I can hook you up with the application. 

Sean: Well, thanks again. Have yourself a good evening. 

Eric: Thank you. 

Once again, thanks to Eric for sitting down and discussing the finer points of keeping BattleTech on the straight and narrow while also showcasing where things can comedically go wrong from time to time.

And as always, MechWarriors: Stay Syrupy.