Rise of Mechnificent Seven – Forging Community with Tex and Paul & Jesse of Focht’s Network

Where Dungeons & Dragons have enjoyed over a decade of free publicity thanks to shows like Critical Role, BattleTech’s foray into podcasts and actual-play broadcasts is a more recent phenomenon. Thankfully, the franchise is well on its way to being well-supported in the realm of multimedia productions, and the latest to come out of Adepticon might just be the best one yet.

Not only does the Mechnificent Seven have a great cast of some of the best BattleTech content creators around the web, but it’s also got the sort of production value you’d expect from even larger brands. Throw on a bit of official support with the likes of Randall Bills and the upcoming BattleTech: Aces system, and you’ve got a winning combination of colorful characters and hilarious adventure.

I wanted the inside scoop on how this whole production came together, so I got Focht’s Network’s Paul and Jesse to sit down with Mechnificent Seven co-star Tex to talk about how this all came to be. Enjoy.

Sean (Sarna): Thank you all for taking the time out of your Saturday to talk to me about the Mechnificent Seven, a new actual play broadcast show coming… I forget the launch date. 

Paul (Focht’s Network): March 30th, 7:00 PM from Adepticon.

Sean: Great! I’m sure we’ll cover that again later, but let’s start with introductions. I’ve talked with a couple of you before. Tex, you were my first interview for Sarna, in fact, so we’re not going to get too far into your BattleTech history because it’s already a matter of public record.

Tex (BPL): I would think people know me by now—intensely private, occasionally I release a video, and in between I disappear. 

Sean: But Paul and Jesse, you’re new here, so let’s get both of your BattleTech histories. What got you into BattleTech and what keeps you playing? 

Jesse (Focht’s Network): Sure. I have a very early memory from the context—I’m gonna say ‘93 or ‘94—where I’m reading a magazine, and the only line I remember from the article I was reading was, “Players will complete missions and increase in rank to achieve the exalted rank of Khan.” There are three screenshots down the side, and the one I remember is that enhanced imaging from MechWarrior 2;  a shot of the Warhammer. I do wanna draw attention to that because I’m hoping your Sarna skills might be able to help me find that article. But yeah, that is one of my earliest memories of thinking, oh man, that sounds awesome.

Then, I remember when the demo CD for MechWarrior 2 came out, and I’ve been in it ever since. The short version is from the video games I eventually found my way to the tabletop, and from the tabletop, one of those instruction manuals directed me to the books; The Warrior Trilogy, like any other guy getting into it in the Nineties. And then it’s off to the races.

Why do I keep playing? I mean, giant stompy robots, obviously. Why not? But also, the depth of the world in BattleTech and the community that is built around it, I think is so unique in any space. Not just tabletop, not just video games—it stands alone on this level of achievement. It’s like Lord of the Rings-level depth but with Star Wars-level fan enthusiasm. Having those two is exactly where I wanna spend all of my time. 

Sean: Right on. And Paul, same questions. 

Paul: Jesse’s answer is so much more game-related than mine. 

Where do I start? I was in grade 11. It was the summer of 1990. My family had just moved from Niagara Falls all the way out to Calgary. My dad was a journalist and he’d taken a job with the Calgary Herald. When you’re 15, 16 years old and you get uprooted across the country like that, it’s life-ending in the mind of a teenager, right?

I was a skater, metalhead, and we’re moving across the country to Alberta, which is essentially Canada’s Texas. And I’m thinking to myself, I am not gonna fit in. I am gonna stick out like a sore thumb. All these cowboys—sorry, Tex—are gonna be picking on me. I have my long bangs and earrings and multicolored hair and I’m thinking, okay, it’s not gonna work.

We got there in the summer and I knew nobody. I had no friends. I was resenting my parents over the fact that I had to hang out with my kid brother for three months. I was desperate for school to start. And of course, fate has a sense of humor. I get my class schedule and my first class on my first day of school in Alberta is a spare. And I’m like, okay what am I gonna do? I don’t know anybody. 

So I went up to the school library to sit down, and when I walked in I saw a couple of dudes in the corner of the library hunched over some ratty old paper mats with some cardboard standouts on them that looked like what I thought were Robotech and Macross on steroids. I was a Robotech fan; I used to watch the cartoon in the mornings before school growing up and I’m like, why not? I’m gonna walk over and talk to these guys. 

And the rest is history. The friendships I forged that day—these guys are still my best friends. I’m 50 years old, so you know, it’s a long time. It made me who I am today.

Why do I keep playing? I love the game. I love the narrative setting. I am an immersive narrative gamer myself. I like the fact that BattleTech is not a metagame. While it does have its imbalances, it’s a very diverse rule set that is easy to adjust and tailor to your needs.

So the game is very playable regardless of what your playstyle is. But more importantly, it goes back to the bonds and friendships that I made because of BattleTech. When I felt isolated and alone, 2,500 miles from the only home I knew, BattleTech gave me the friends who became my best friends for life. They helped form who I was as an adult, and I feel indebted to the community to give back to that.

And if there’s even one person out there who feels isolated or left out, I hope that my giving back to the community can help that person fit in somewhere and have a group of friends or form that and not feel that way anymore.

Sean: We’ll also have to have the all-important question answered. Starting again with Jesse, what is your favorite ‘Mech? 

Jesse: There’s a long answer to this. If this is like a college essay and you need to pad the word count a little later, let me know and I’ll double back because I have a lot to say about this. But short answer: Templar checks off a lot of boxes for me. It’s a newer design compared to a lot of what the old grognards are looking at. But I mean, it’s a Davion Omni--Awesome. It looks cool, it moves quickly enough on the table that it’s actually useful, but it’s heavy enough to bring a lot of toys. 

It’s so well designed to be iconic of the faction. The Tancred hero variant has two RAC-5s tied to a Targeting Computer, so you just get to, you know, rattle ’em, boys. Love it. I love everything about it. I am ecstatic that the mini just came out in that Davion Heavy Battle Lance at the end of last year. 

Sean: All right, Paul, your favorite ‘Mech.

Paul: Like I said, I’m a Macross guy. The Phoenix Hawk LAM PHX-HK2. I like flying. I like hovering. I like being annoying, and I like extensive rule sets. 

Jesse: There are so many LAMs in the Focht’s Network studio everywhere.

Sean: I remember being jealous of all the LAMs I saw everywhere. They looked very cool. I wanted one. 

You know what? Tex, I feel bad we don’t have a lot of questions for you until we get to the Mechnificent Seven stuff. How about you remind us of your favorite ‘Mech?

Tex: One AWS-8Q Awesome. It’s not broken, doesn’t need fixing. It works.

And with the Hunchback video, I rekindled one of my favorite old arguments. It was one of my absolute delights to watch people really take up both sides of the orthodoxy versus the radical set of the Hunchback. I actually have a picture that one of my fans sent me. He got both of those tattooed on the back of his calves. He has the stained glass Hunchback 4G Orthodoxy on one side and then the radical on the other. And I said, you couldn’t decide, could you? 

Sean: I still have the radical Hunchback 4P as my desktop background.

Paul: Well that’s the thing. I always thought of the Hunchback as the first OmniMech because it had so many variants through all the TROs, right? It was crazy.

Tex: Fill the boombox, apply the boombox—that’s the way they work. But no, I loved rekindling that. One of my first few loves was the Hunchback, just because it was walk forward and shout my Macho Man lines. 

I always have a soft spot for the Charger, but I said my piece on that. The Charger‘s one of the most permanent ways of loving or hating something in BattleTech and a few dice rolls. Because you will either Kali Ma punch someone’s engine out through their back—you know, very much take their heart outta their chest—or you’ll explode in a way that you didn’t know was possible. 

There’s a few favorites, but I’m an Awesome guy. I like the Awesome. By that, I mean, I enjoy the Awesome. I consider myself largely above average. If I was a Greek philosopher I would consider myself Mediocrities. 

Sean: Good answers. Now we’re gonna move on to a quick bit of background for where you guys are coming from. Paul, we’ll start with you and the Focht’s Network. Tell us about Focht’s Network. When did it get started? What does it do? 

Paul: So, Focht’s Network was an idea we came up with back in 2021. It was rooted in our playgroup, which we thought at the time were the only BattleTech players in Toronto. The game was just at the beginning of its renaissance at that point. Me and one of the original founders of Focht’s Network were brainstorming ideas about what to name our event group and network that we were gonna try to build of players so we could have games at stores or maybe even tournaments or events at conventions, things like that.

He was reminiscing about the days in Calgary when he had a BattleTech League team named Focht’s Follies. And when he said that, I just kind of had an epiphany and said Focht’s News Network. but we changed that over to Focht’s Network so it didn’t cause too much controversy. We didn’t want to infringe on anybody’s IP. 

Sean: Nobody wants to get sued.

Paul: Yeah. So it became the Network because of course we were out there trying to network not only with people like Tex and Red, Catalyst, TikTok Battletech, and other influencers out there, the guys at Death From Above Wargaming, whoever. We were trying to network a community because we felt that while the BattleTech community is massive—which it is around the world— it’s a series of islands. We wanted to try to be somewhat of a bridge to bring it all together. That was the idea. 

So what do we do? Focht’s Network is a gaming and events organization and the official events team for Six Sides of Gaming. We specialize in BattleTech events in all its forms, from in-store events to conventions to YouTube. We run weekly games at a few game stores here in Toronto and Jesse manages one of those. Henny, our other XO, handles another one at a different game store. Both stores have fairly large crowds. Jesse regularly has anywhere from 12 to 15 people. The guys up in Barrie at Henny’s game store have around eight to 15 people on any given night. 

In addition to the game stores, we are also a convention team and we have been running The Gaming Room for Fan Expo at both Toronto Comicon and Fan Expo Canada for the last three years. Toronto Comicon we just did this past weekend and that has an annual attendance of about 30 to 35,000 people. Fan Expo, which happens every August, has an annual attendance of about 130 to 140,000 people throughout the weekend. They’re both very large events. And of course, we bring BattleTech to, not gamers per se, but to the nerd culture environment, trying to attract new players to the community.

On top of that, we also do Anime North, which is Canada’s largest anime convention, and I believe it’s the top three or four in the world for its size. It’s about 40,000 people as well. We are usually the main gaming attraction there for tabletop gaming. Last but not least, we also do Breakout Con, which is Toronto’s only organized gaming convention at the moment.

We also do YouTube and that’s where most people might know us from on Six Sides of Gaming. We are the official BattleTech studio for the channel. We have become the kind of quasi-face of BattleTech: Aces over the course of the last couple of years as we do tutorials and showcase the game in our weekly streams, both on what originally started as ‘Friday Night Aces’ with myself and Tommy Gofton, and then became ‘Ace’s Legacy’ with Jesse and myself on Sunday nights.

We’ve also done a few talk show news-related shows that we’re gonna be firing up again soon called ‘BattleComm: Unity.’

Sean: Let’s move on to Six Sides of Gaming. Sort of the same question, when did it get started? What do you do? How many subscribers do you have?

Paul: Six Sides of Gaming was started by Tommy Gofton and a couple of partners back in August of 2011. They did various streams back then, most of it D&D. They did a little bit of Call of Cthulhu and lots of different tabletop games. The studio specializes in actual-play content from Dungeons & Dragons to Shadowrun to Lynnvander Studio‘s own board game designs and of course BattleTech. 

We like to do things with celebrities from the Dungeons & Dragons community, the BattleTech community, and also anime and whatnot. We have an Apex Legends show coming out that’s Dungeons & Dragons-based soon. We’re sitting now probably around 58,000 or so subscribers and we try to pump out as much content as possible. And of course, we have plans to get bigger and badder over the course of the next year.

Sean: Right on. I know we did a little bit on the BPL last time we spoke, Tex, but it’s been a few years and I’m sure there have been a few changes. Why don’t you tell us about the Black Pants Legion? What do you do? How many members do you have? How does one get involved in the Black Pants Legion?

Tex: The Black Pants Legion is a collective or a gestalt consciousness that makes memes and shitposts and does good things for charity. We’ve raised about, I’d say between half a million and a million dollars over the past few years. We saved George Ledoux’s house. We bought a game store owner a new prosthetic leg. We’ve saved a lot of houses. We’ve buried people, especially during COVID. Just this last Christmas, I think we raised $35,000 to $40,000 in just a couple of hours of streaming. We go pretty heavy and hard for charity.

So if you wanna think of us as an old English Victorian Gentleman’s club mixed with a little bit of the Shriners mixed with modern, weird internet people. We’ve been described as largely the last vestige of the old internet—and I think that is probably true—before the internet got turned into normies and everything started to look like Facebook and Reddit.

We’re just a bunch of weirdos. And we’re all weirdos who realize that if we run together in a majestic nerd herd, we’re not alone and we can do good stuff together. We did try to buy the Albanian Air Force that one time. That was an interesting story. That was cool. 

Sean: I was really hoping you did. Did you?

Tex: We got pretty close. We reached out to their ambassador, their ambassador-in-residence, and their foreign minister. We had the money, they just didn’t wanna play ball even after I offered to wear the ‘I Heart Albania’ t-shirt for a year. And then I was gonna tell people nice things about Albania for a year free of charge. I was gonna help them double their tourism to like 12. 

Sean: How expensive are we talkin’ here? I don’t know what’s in Albania’s Air Force.

Tex: Well, what they had was a bunch of Chinese MiG knockoffs. So they had like Shenyang F-5s and Chengdu F-7s. Which is good enough for a man who has no MiGs. These are good enough. And I learned not to look a gift MiG in the mouth. You gotta take the gift MiG in the hand, as it were, and you work with what you got. 

As far as joining, we have a public Discord called The Black Pants Legion Auxiliary. You can find that out there. It’s fairly easy to join. We are just a bunch of weirdos. We’re definitely not a cult because cults get tax breaks. 

Jesse: You can tell it’s a good cult because they tell you that they’re not a cult.

Tex: No, no, they have tax breaks so they can afford like Bentleys and stuff like that. I mean, god, man, I wouldn’t know what to do with a Bentley. That car’s too expensive to look at, let alone drive. 

Jesse: Also, I mean, heck, you need all the matching robes for so many people, right?

Tex: Robes are expensive these days, right?

Jesse: Oh hell yeah, the robe market! The curtain I have to wear in the show for the ComStar stuff? Ooof. A good robe is hard to find.

Paul: That curtain came with the house and the house is over a hundred years old, so…

Sean: That curtain probably is haunted. 

Jesse: Good. I’ll tell you this, it’s not fun to breathe while you’re wearing it. It’s going through the laundry before we shoot this thing again. 

Tex: Hey, don’t worry. Asbestos is the bestos. That’s what they said in the Seventies. 

Jesse: Yeah, they all turned out fine. 

Sean: Alright, let’s move on to the Mechnificent Seven. So this is gonna be a general question for anybody who wants to answer. What is the Mechnificent Seven? 

Paul: I think all three of us should answer because it probably would be an interesting set of three different answers. I’ll answer with the misfit Avengers of BattleTech with a side of chaos.

Sean: I like it. 

Jesse: That’s pretty good. I’ll add that it’s a community-unifying project in the form of a BattleTech-themed A-Team with less production value. 

Tex: I would describe it as BattleTech community theater with less drinking than my local community theater, but not by choice. 

Sean: Does that still mean there’s a lot of drinking? 

Tex: Not that much drinking, no. My local community theater has a guy who actually did a one-man Moby Dick. That was… interesting. It was three hours I cannot get back or ever forget.

Paul: I’m not gonna ask how he swallowed himself.

Tex: It was interesting. The whole soundtrack was Steppenwolf. 

Sean: And who came up with the Mechnificent Seven? 

Tex: Not guilty. 

Paul: Tommy Gofton came up with the original concept. The original idea was to have a stop animation show using plastic miniatures in the lines of Robot Chicken. Over the course of the first year we were doing the BattleTech: Aces streams with all the various content creators and influencers like Tex and Red, the idea shifted into let’s try and do a MechWarrior: Destiny actual-play RPG. There wasn’t a lot of actual play BattleTech content out there, aside from what Jerry and the guys at Penny Arcade were doing. So Tommy thought, you know, this is a good idea. Let’s bring all our friends together and build community by using BattleTech: Aces with its cooperative gameplay. 

Sean: And it has been filmed. Where, when, and how was The Mechnificent Seven filmed? 

Jesse: It was filmed at the Six Sides of Gaming studio, which is a wonderful haunted mansion in the wilds of Ontario. 

Sean: Can confirm. Very haunted.

Jesse: One hundred percent. Rooms are sometimes there, sometimes they’re not. Doors move around. It’s great. It’s wild. We filmed it in November last year, I think. Actually, it was a couple of days after I met you, Sean, for the first time. You popped into one of our games while I was on the phone with Josh Derksen frantically doing some rewriting.

We ended up filming it over the course of a couple of days—long days—but got it all in the can. It’s sort of been in post-production in various levels of intensity between then and literally moments ago. The first episode should be out by the time folks are seeing this, but there’s still tweaking and work going on in some later stuff as we speak.

Sean: How many episodes are there going to be?

Paul: We’ve got four actual play episodes with RP that culminate in two more BattleTech: Aces episodes. 

Sean: Not everybody has played MechWarrior: Destiny, and not everyone has played Alpha Strike or Aces. What sort of experience can viewers expect in terms of episode structure?

Jesse: Two very different things in the structure of each episode. What we really wanted to do—especially with having the community and people like Tex, Red, and Randall—is show off the narrative side of BattleTech.

That’s something we’re doing with folks in general, right? We never run a scenario that doesn’t have a narrative behind it. We want to highlight the vastness of this big universe. So the two styles of episodes, those actual play and role-play MechWarrior: Destiny is: here are some BattleTech characters in the BattleTech universe, trying to do BattleTech stuff.

You don’t think about it that often because all the books have a giant robot on the cover kicking over a tank or punching another robot or something, but a lot of the coolest stuff in BattleTech happens when characters are talking to each other or when characters are having an impromptu pit fight and getting the stuffing kicked outta each other.

So we try to do a lot of that in the role-playing—really bring out the character, the flavor of the universe so that you could show your mom who’s never heard of any of this and she could go and get a taste for what life is like in the Inner Sphere. Then on the other side, we have BattleTech: Aces, which as you know, every good story in BattleTech concludes with a ‘Mech fight.

Those are going to be similar to what you’ve seen in some other stuff that people do in their battle reports or the like. We’re really highlighting the BattleTech: Aces system—this new AI deck—and showing off how now that we have these characters who you’re familiar with, who you care about, how cool it is to see them manifesting through their BattleMechs in this game of Alpha Strike.

And they’re not fighting each other! They’re fighting together against this horrifyingly smart AI that Lynnvander, Josh, and Tommy have created. We’re showing off a lot of different elements in different places, but together we’re hoping it makes for one really fun, immersive experience. 

Sean: And what’s the kind of tone people can expect from this show? Is this gonna be drama, comedy, thriller? What are we looking at? 

Jesse: Well, I think you’ve met Paul, you’ve met Tex, you’ve met me. I think we are 100% straight-faced serious people at all times. 

Tex: There is a phrase that I think sums up a lot of the stuff that happened in the story. And the phrase that kind of exemplifies the tone—if I may, gentlemen—is quote, “Randolph P. Checker’s, old-fashioned, smooth-sipping, apple-flavored engine degreaser,” end quote. 

Jesse: When we’re playing BattleTech, either for the show, stores, or conventions, what we’re focusing on is the fun. There is a lot of fun to be had in this show. 

Paul: Yeah. If the game is not fun and it’s not ‘rule of cool,’ what’s the point? We don’t see any point in having something that’s just very dry. If we wanna just roll dice, we could play Yahtzee. 

Sean: Very good point. Well, let’s talk about a little bit more of the story of the Mechnificent Seven. First thing, when in-universe does the Mechnificent Seven story take place? 

Paul: So the story was created two ways. I created this timeline on a spreadsheet, and then dumped it into Jesse’s lap and said, “Here, you got about a week to get the story put together.”

Sean: This is how all good screenplays get started. 

Paul: Exactly. Because we had been streaming ‘Friday Night Aces’ for like 18 months. At that point, Tommy and I had been using our characters—mine being my old character from my campaigns when I was younger and Tommy’s being brand-new. We wanted to keep those two guys in the story, so we had to move it up a little bit ’cause we were fighting in the Clan Invasion. So we set it in I believe 3061. Correct, Jess? 

Jesse: That’s right. 

Paul: Right before the start of the FedCom Civil War. 

Sean: Okay, so that’s like Chaos March times.

Jesse: Yes, Chaos March. Task Force Serpent is back from fighting the Clans. Victor’s found out he doesn’t have a home and things there are just starting to heat up. I think the second Whitting Conference is a few months away. 

Sean: According to the trailer synopsis, you guys are going to first meet on Solaris VII. Why the Game World? 

Paul: Twofold. One, it’s a good place—a venue, a backdrop you might say—for getting together a cast of people that have never met before. It’s a good tavern meeting planet. It also has always been a back part of my character’s backstory that he was a prodigy—he was the second or third-tier tournament winner when he was a teenager on Solaris. So it just kind of all fit together. 

Sean: It is also mentioned in the synopsis that you’re going to be taking on the Word of Blake on the planet Hall. This is before the Jihad in 3061—before the Word of Blake sort of revealed themselves as the big villains. This was also while Hall was still an independent world in the Chaos March. Can you give us any hints about what exactly the Word of Blake is up to on Hall? 

Jesse: Hall was assigned to me and I wrote the story for it, but I think a few of us recognize Hall, it’s from one of those old FanPro sourcebooks. Hall is one of those worlds in the Chaos March where nobody is in control. It’s lawless. It’s not a frontier per se, but there’s room for so much to happen, which gives us lots of great storytelling opportunities.

The way the Hinterlands is set up right now in ilClan where the creators have clearly set apart somewhere for people to play; that’s what they’ve done. And now all of us big BattleTech fanatics, we know that this is fertile ground for the Word of Blake to start doing what they’re doing. So having them be the eventual antagonists is kind of a given. 

It’s also easier because everybody loves to hate the Word of Blake. Even the people who side with the Word of Blake know the Word of Blake are the bad guys. And that kind of confusion actually comes up a little bit during the show. I will leave you a little hint about that. We’ll have to talk more about that once people have seen it. 

From BattleTech history, the Word of Blake is getting established, but everything’s a mess, so it’s a perfect place for messy people to do messy things. 

Sean: Messy people to do messy things. Let’s learn about more of your characters. Paul, let’s start with you. Tell us about your character in the game. 

Paul: So my guy, if you’ve watched the ‘Friday Night Aces’ show, is a Phoenix Hawk Land-Air ‘Mech pilot who has become dispossessed and is now piloting a Spector. So my background is a reconnaissance intelligence guy with high-speed, high-mobility tactics. A bit of a smart ass on the commlinks and the second in command of the Lynnvander Knights. His name is Gus Jansen, callsign is ‘Wiley.’

Sean: Tex, you’re going to be reprising your longtime role of Randolph P. Checkers?

Tex: Randolph P. Checkers, Esquire, mercenary, and professor at large. It’s kinda weird bringing in a canon character that was somehow accidentally made canon, but I guess that’s fate. 

Sean: So what brings Randolph P. Checkers to Solaris VII? I thought he was on Van Zandt teaching university-level classes.

Tex: He goes where the money is. There’s what I like to call the yuppie Nuremberg defense. “Why do you do bad, shady things for a living?” Well, because I have a mortgage, right? “So why are you on Solaris?” Have you seen the taxes on property recently? Have you seen the price of eggs? Man’s gotta eat.

So, yeah, someone said, “Hey, would you mind eeking out here to Solaris?” He is like, “Are you paying for my airfare?” I mean, I’m sure that was a negotiation. But any mercenary knows one tale, and that’s, ‘Have gun, will travel.’ 

The reason I think people play mercenaries in BattleTech is that they love the idea of classic pulp novels where it’s like, oh, there’s an unknown island full of riches, and I’m putting together an expedition to go out there into the jungle and find the lost city of, you know, Ebola or whatever. And you’re like, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll go to Ebola Seven. That sounds fine. I hear it’s pretty fine, you know?” 

Jesse: Yeah, the idea is really catching on.

Tex: But that’s the thing; BattleTech‘s a lived-in universe where everyone smokes and drinks and is miserable. The cool stompy robots are like just the surface level. You imagine going into a bar in BattleTech and it looks like something from 1978 where like even the walls are smoking Pall Malls, right?

There’s just that fog, and you go in to speak with a bunch of shady people and get hooked up with a job. And hey, maybe you’re gonna get killed by ComStar by the end of the week, but you might make enough money to buy a nice car. So you know, give and take.

Sean: At least it keeps you working.

Tex: Exactly—you do something to get by. And that’s the other part of the BattleTech universe that I think jives with a lot of people: survival. It’s not an easy universe. It’s not a noble, bright universe where everybody gets what they want in the end. It’s a universe that appeals to a lot of people because it also reminds you that the meek shall inherit zilch. 

You have to go out there and fight, and the only thing that really matters is the context of your character and the content of their ability to kick ass. And so you find a lot of characters in BattleTech that are wonderful underdogs, that are people from nowhere who have just managed to be a little bit smarter, a little bit more clever, a little bit tougher, have a little bit more gumption.

Sean: Right on. Let’s move on to the ‘Mech choices. Big Red’s not here, so I guess we’re not gonna be able to talk about what he chose to bring to the Mechnificent Seven, but I’m hoping he plays a hilarious character. 

Tex: It’s absolutely hilarious. 

Jesse: He’s so lighthearted, everyone’s gonna love him. He plays really kid-friendly.

Tex: Just imagine a monitor lizard wrapped in human skin—very binary decision-making when it comes to the application of extreme violence. And it is a perfect character for the setting. 

Paul: That is a fly. I’m going to eat it.

Sean: I see. Interesting. We’ll start with Paul then. Why the Spector as Wiley’s ride of choice? 

Paul: Well, as I mentioned earlier, my guy is a LAM pilot. I am dispossessed now from the LAM. The Spector I chose because I like to play high-mobility units. I like speed with a little bit of pop and the Spector does have a large laser on it.

And to touch what Tex just said, when you’re in a lighter ‘Mech, you kinda have that underdog mentality. I kind of like the idea of being in my light ‘Mech and popping assaults or heavies and them not being able to do anything about it because of my speed.

Sean: Tex, I think canonically, Randolph P. Checkers pilots an Awesome. Were there any arguments over who got to drive the Awesome, or did you get that one unopposed? 

Tex: I said I’ll drive the Awesome, but I also said I’ll drive anything. There’s something that I’ve heard quoted really well and I believe in it, which is, “Nothing’s faster than a rental.” So, you know, fighting in used equipment is fine enough because you don’t care if it comes back. It’s not yours.

Sean: So is the Awesome you’re piloting yours, or is this a rental? 

Tex: I didn’t check the sticker, but I’m presuming if they’re paying for it, I’m using theirs.

Sean: Fair. And in general, did everybody at the table sort of get to choose their ‘Mechs or were they assigned? How did that work?

Paul: So we have two brand-new players to the game that are Maryam and Saige. They have both been playing for just under a year. So we selected their ‘Mechs along with them. I asked both the girls, what is it you think is cool about a ‘Mech and what is an effective way we’re gonna wanna fight? And Saige being a little off-the-wall, the Scorpion seemed like the perfect choice because it’s an off-the-wall ‘Mech. As Tex put it before, it’s a fighting coffee table. 

Maryam’s Ostroc, I think, is very player-friendly for a lot of new players. It does a lot of things well; it’s fairly quick, it’s got armor, and it’s got some punch. 

Sean: Mm-hmm. Now speaking of Saige and that Scorpion, did she ever complain about the ride quality? Because the Scorpions are famously bumpy. 

Jesse: Saige’s character, Krateson, who you will all meet shortly, has actually done some work on that BattleMech from the outside of it. These are some very unique characters doing very unique things. The quality of the Scorpion is the least interesting thing we’re gonna see in this show.

Sean: Randall Bills is also going to be in the show as well, and he picked a Banshee 3S for his ride. Did the table appropriately ridicule him for picking the only good Banshee?

Paul: After he told us the story about why he likes that Banshee when he was here with us, there was no way I could ridicule him on it. He loves the ‘Mech. He just straight-up loves it, and he just wants to pilot what he loves. I think it was his first ‘Mech if I remember correctly. Right. Jess? 

Jesse: I don’t know all the details of the story, but the short version from my perspective was if Randall Bill says he wants a Banshee, he gets a Banshee. We’re not going to fight him on that.

But yeah, Randall’s history with BattleTech is so huge and so much of what we have in it is because of him. Everything he does—even the choice of his character, which I think we’ll talk about a bit later if it comes up—is based on canonical stuff in the universe that’s happened because of him. So we’re not giving him grief over any of that. 

Sean: Fair. Randall’s unfortunately not here, so I can’t ask him about it, but Jabal Arazad isn’t a name that I recognize. What’s the story behind Randall’s character?

Jesse: Randall and I got to character creation really tight before the deadline. We finally managed to get a half hour to chat with each other. I knew he was a Kurita guy, so I created this Draconis Combine expat. He’s got a bit of a shady history—maybe it’s Yakuza ties, maybe it’s not, gave him room to play. 

He looked it over, said it’s okay, great, “But can I make this one change to who he is?” And he described—and thank goodness I had recently reread this a couple of months ago—but do you remember Randall wrote the anthology series that was the buildup to MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries? Your tech is named Fahad Arazad, who is a Kurita expat masquerading as a Davion outback guy. 

The story that Randall had written for him in that anthology was that his father, Jabal Arazad the First, was an Azami in the Combine who had very difficult living circumstances because that’s sort of like being a second-class citizen the way the Kuritans run things. 

Randall wanted to play the grandson of Jabal. He said, “I want to carry on that character.” So Fahad from MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries at some point went on and had a son and named him after his father. And it’s a whole thing, like a sign of reconciliation from the son to the father, he wants to carry that through.

I of course said yes, that’s a great idea. And it’s a real deep-cut tie-in for people to recognize. And Randall Bills can tie into the canon because he’s the guy who does that.

Sean: When it’s your game, you do what you want.

Jesse: Exactly. So we now have some pretty canon ties, right? This character in particular is really real. Randolph Checkers is real. He’s been quoted, he’s canon. All this stuff coming to life. 

Sean: So is everybody being canonized? Is that how this works? 

Jesse: We’ll have to wait and see. 

Paul: Have to wait and see, man.

Tex: Yeah, well, with some of the stuff I do, I expect to be de-canonized. I expect them to send a little letter that says, “You are now errata.” 

Jesse: Well, you remember how they wrote the Jihad sourcebooks where they were like, “This might have happened. You don’t know.”

Tex: I love the Jihad sourcebooks where they were just like, this is our best guess. Some of those books, I think, are very unappreciated for that reason. 

As somebody who’s done real history work, I feel that one of the things that people don’t appreciate is historiography—how history is written. If you look back at ancient history, a lot of the craft the Romans wrote was absolutely propaganda. They wrote, “Oh, look at these decadent people and how corrupt they are,” and it’s meant to be a lesson or a moral play. And I feel that approach, that blurring of the lens in history, is really important. 

Some parts of BattleTech are written like that. I love parts of the Jihad books where they suggested that, “Hey, there were a lot of nukes that went off,” right? And sometimes when there’s a snowball fight, you forget who starts what—what was an accident and what was on purpose.

I have to put this out there and some people will probably hate me for it, but in my head, I have written my own little thought on the Jihad where I think that it’s really ridiculous to say out of nowhere ComStar had a bunch of stuff that just started kicking the shit out of everything. What I think probably happened is ComStar started a bunch of false flag crap and that kicked off another Succession War. 

And now that everything’s been plastered again, everyone’s like, “Oh no, look at what ComStar did. Those Blakists blew it all up. That wasn’t us. That was a secret army of cyborg ninjas that came outta nowhere. Thank god they’re all gone now and no one will ever think about it again because they were so evil and they all disappeared.” 

Sean: And maybe we’ll be hearing from them again someday. Who could say?

Tex: Who’s to say we got ’em all? Maybe they’ll come out and blow up everything else.

Jesse: Hmm. You know, they had secret planets. Haven’t found all the secret planets.

Tex: Yeah, that’s true. It’s not stuff telescopes can’t see, ’cause you know, they’re secret. They painted the whole planet Vantablack. Can’t see it. 

Jesse: Obviously what’s canon and not is up to Catalyst and even something can be canon and not be true.

Sean: True. Just like The Animated Series. 

Jesse: Exactly. 

Paul: Yeah. One of the things we have always done with Focht’s Network is when we write our scenarios for their conventions, we used to call them Focht’s Urban Legends so we would take an actual canon event and then add something weird or dynamic or something eye-catching to it.

First-time players would come in and see something that was kind of wild or extreme. For one of the conventions, we did a scenario that had kaiju in it, and we did that on Hesperus II because, in the irradiated lowlands, they have dinosaur-like creatures.

So we put it in the scenario where Kincaid was stealing the double heat sink plans. You’re trying to get him, then he hides, you run across the tarmac, and dinosaurs start destroying the spaceport. We’ve always tried to do something along those lines; kind of cool, a little bit off-the-wall. 

Are we going to see something kind of cool in the Mechnificent Seven? We’ll have to leave that for the viewers to see. 

Sean: I noticed that the Mechnificent Seven kind of skews heavy. There are three assault ‘Mechs, one heavy (that’s kind of an oversized medium), two mediums, and one light. Is it fair to say there’s gonna be a lot of hammer-and-anvil actions? Where one side of the force will rely on overwhelming firepower while the other pins the enemy down?

Jesse: I would not expect that. The scenarios we design, there’s very rarely gonna be something that’s a straight-up fight, because that’s boring—like Paul described, that’s Yahtzee. Everybody lines up their ‘Mechs like it’s Wolves on the Border and you roll dice until you go home? That’s no fun. 

The size of the force and how it’s aligned get less predictable because we have different objectives and different things that need to be accomplished. It’s not a straight-up BattleMech fight. In addition to that, in some of the extra scenarios that we’ve designed and are taking to places like Comicon and Adepticon that feature the Mechnificent Seven characters, there’s always more than one consideration. 

You will never play a Focht’s Network scenario where it’s just ‘go destroy the enemy.’ It’s always gonna be more interesting than that. 

Paul: It also works against us too. Being so heavy, it makes it a challenge on the tabletop when you are out there with three assault ‘Mechs, right? They’re all 3/5 movement profile too—they’re not moving around the board very quickly. So you start putting the hammer there and it doesn’t move and you’re fighting highly mobile units or going against recon units or anything, you really gotta think twice about everything you do, right? You have to really pre-plan it. 

Then you add in Josh Derksen, the designer of Aces, his idea for scenarios, and the idea of being able to stand straight up and fight just doesn’t happen. It’ll never happen in one of our games.

Sean: Right on. Okay, these questions are going to be for Jesse. We’ve dealt with all the players, now let’s talk about the Game Masters. Mechnificent Seven will have two game masters. Jesse, you’re gonna be handling the MechWarrior: Destiny side of things, and Josh Derksen will be handling Aces as the guy flipping the cards and seeing what happens with the enemy ‘Mechs. Are the two of you still gonna be present during each phase of the game?

Jesse: Josh isn’t there for the role-playing segments. I’m sure he’d love to be, but he wasn’t one of the characters, and he’s developing Aces—he has a few things to do. When we’re running the Alpha Strike game, I take a seat at the table just to hang out and occasionally remind everyone why you’re shooting at that guy and how the NPCs would react and stuff.

So if you don’t like the sound of my voice, I got bad news for you: I’m still gonna be there. But yeah, generally, I’m shepherding people through the role-playing and Josh is shepherding slash teaching slash running the Aces deck.

Sean: There’s gonna be a lot of obviously, colorful characters at the table. We’ve got content creators, new players, and perhaps the biggest BattleTech veteran to have ever lived. How difficult was it to wrangle everybody together? Was it difficult to keep people in line?

Jesse: Once we had everyone together, it was smooth sailing. I feel like you hear every production everyone talks about how much they love to work with each other, but we have a really good group of people in the Network. We’ve already met Tex and Red—they’re good folks. Sage and Maryam are both old friends at the studio. 

When you’re a game master for a roleplaying game, that’s always difficult. That’s just a function of life. Every single person was different. Paul knew exactly what he wanted right from the outset. Here’s my character, here’s his background, here’s his ‘Mech, here’s his stuff. We were done in five minutes.

Saige and Maryam, I met with them personally and we talked through the Destiny system and it was a lot of back and forth. Because they’ve only been playing for a year or so, they had a lot of questions about what would this mean for my character in BattleTech? And we’d go back and forth like that. 

Tex and I had a web call for about half an hour which was a delight. It was my first time meeting Tex, and I was delighted to find out he was everything I wanted him to be. 

Paul: Sounds romantic. 

Jesse: Sounds romantic a hundred percent. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Tex and the work that he does, whereas Tex has, I would say, a barely acceptable amount of respect for Tex and the work that Tex does. We clashed a little on that.

Tex: That’s true.

Jesse: Yeah. But we worked together, we came up with some fun stuff, and we told some jokes. 

Randall had an idea for who he wanted to be, but I had to build him into the universe. I’m going into too much detail—the point is everyone was a little different. Everyone comes at it differently. 

I am accustomed to that being part of my job of smoothing out the bumps and making sure, here are the boxes you need to check. Here’s what I need to check to get this story going. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t smooth, but it worked and we got it. That’s how all good productions run, and how all good role-playing games run. 

Sean: Don’t I know it. Now, the Mechnificent Seven you said will be running for six episodes starting March 30th. Is that one episode every week?  

Paul: Yeah, it’ll be one episode per week running through six weeks on Six Sides of Gaming’s YouTube. It’ll be at 7:00 PM on March 30th. After the premiere, we are going to do our Aces legacy stream from Adepticon, except we won’t be playing a game. We’ll be taking questions and if Tex or Red wants to jump in on that stream, they will be there with us. Of course, Randall will be with us there as well, so we will probably answer questions from the fans right after the premiere. 

Sean: And after these six episodes are done, will the Mechnificent Seven return? 

Paul: That is the plan. We already have the concepts for a second season well underway. So let’s hope the community reacts positively to the show and gives it the support that it needs, and we will gladly put a season two out there. Or three or four or five, depending on the popularity.

Sean: Alright, I’ve got my ‘Mech fingers crossed that this becomes a huge success and births a new media franchise in the BattleTech universe.

Jesse: Thanks very much, Sean. 

Sean: That’s all I had. Was there anything that I missed or anything else you wanted to talk about?

Tex: Final words could be something smart. Well failing that, I will say that it’s really important for people to understand—especially with as crazy as the world is—that it’s never easier than now to find people who enjoy your hobby online. It’s never easier than now to find folks who enjoy just being stupid, fun people to play games online, regardless of the distance between you.

There are so many ways to play BattleTech. There are so many RPGs to play. There are so many wonderful online communities where you can just find folks and have a good time, and this is an era that I think all of us in our youth missed because of the limitations of technology and interconnectedness where we had to go down to the local game store and hope it wasn’t just Magic: The Gathering.

Now we can make our own places. Now we can find our own places, and now it’s very easy to find other people to do things with. And I love that a bunch of us knuckleheads put our heads together and managed to make this happen. This wasn’t that terribly difficult—it just comes from a place of passion and wanting to do it. And I think that the message we should probably send to everyone else is that if knuckleheads like us can do something like this, then you can too. 

And if we fail to impress you, make your own. We’ll be glad to watch it. This is an era where we are all creators and the bar to creation is very low. You just have to have the willpower to do it. I think everybody should be out there making stuff right now because that is the secret sauce to being happy in an otherwise difficult time. 

Sean: Thank you so much for sitting down to talk to me about the Mechnificent Seven, about yourselves, and I’m looking forward to the premiere.

Paul: Thank you for having us, Sean. 

Jesse: Thanks very much. 

Tex: Thank you. 

Thanks again to Paul and Jesse of the Focht’s Network, Tex of the Black Pants Legion, and everyone else who helped make the Mechnificent Seven. You can catch the next episode every Sunday at 7:00 PM EST on Six Sides of Gaming.

And as always, MechWarriors: Stay Syrupy.