Sarna In 2025 – A (Slightly Late) Preview With Wiki Admin Dmon

As has become tradition around these parts, we’re starting the year with giving you, our dear readers, a preview of what’s to come in 2025. Or we would have if I hadn’t gotten sick, and then Dmon got sick, and then work stuff just sort of kept us from going over the final edits for the interview. That’s just how 2025 is going for a lot of us.

But we’ve finally gotten healthy, got our work done, and now we can give you our state of the wiki address just a month or so later than we’d initially intended! There are a few ongoing changes to the wiki to discuss as well as a few big projects that will make Sarna’s information faster to access and more accurate.

So without further ado, here’s wiki admin Dmon with the state of Sarna, 2025. Enjoy.


Draconis Combine Logo

Sean (Sarna): Welcome to our first interview for 2025—the Sarna State of the Wiki. I am joined here by Dmon, and before we begin, let’s first give a brief introduction to yourself. Who are you, Dmon? 

Dmon (Also Sarna): I’m just generally a bit of a BattleTech fan for a long, long time. We’re talking about 35 years at this point. I’m kind of the guy who steers Sarna, the ‘director to-go’ these days, I think. That’s probably the best description of what I do. 

Sean: We’re going to have a brief rundown of your BattleTech history. You said you’ve been into BattleTech for 35 years. How did that start? How has it gone? What’s your BattleTech history? 

Dmon: I picked BattleTech up at some point in the very, very early ‘90s. I’m not quite certain because several things happened around the same time. I’m not sure which one came first, but I did not realize that all these bits of BattleTech were the same thing, because there was the BattleTech cartoon, which was about ‘94, and then there was MechWarrior 2, which was, I think, it was ‘92, was it?

Sean: Actually, I think it was slightly after, because I think ‘93 was Doom. I’ll just check, because we have this whole thing called a wiki… 1995. 

“I picked BattleTech up at some point in the very, very early ‘90s … and then it just progressed to—of all things—making spreadsheets on my dad’s computer of all the stats for all the ‘Mechs in MechWarrior 2.”

Dmon: We do, yes. Alright, so a little bit later than I thought. See, I’m younger than I look, obviously. 

Sean: Obviously! I also started with MechWarrior 2 and the cartoon. 

Dmon: Yeah, and all of that. And then it just progressed to—of all things—making spreadsheets on my dad’s computer of all the stats for all the ‘Mechs in MechWarrior 2, and then there was MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries. Then, completely randomly, not even a local game shop—it was a comic shop which happened to have a shelf of D&D and stuff like that—I picked up a TRO: 3050.

I think it might have been the revised version, which was maybe about ‘96, ‘97? And it was like, these look like some of those things from that game I was playing—not knowing there was a wider universe. And then eventually I just fell down a rabbit hole and picked up the novels and stuff like that.

The greatest irony is I didn’t find out for about 10 years that Ral Partha Europe was based in my home city, about five minutes walk from the comic shop I discovered the TRO in.

Sean: Did you eventually manage to walk over there and just pick up some minis?

Dmon: Eventually, yeah. As I said, it took me about 10 years. I’ve got the new MechWarrior 5: Clans—I got it ‘cause I’m a good ol ‘blighty. I only got it about two weeks before Christmas. Because of what I do for a job, I was snowed under with overtime at work, it was left in an unopened box for a while.

I’ve been mostly playing MechWarrior 5: Clans and reading all the novels. Generally doing stuff on the wiki—that’s me all year round, though.

TRO 3050 Cover

Sean: Alright, well let’s get to the all-important question. What is your favorite ‘Mech? 

Dmon: Now, this is a bit of a loaded question for me because for many years I was not a fan of the original TRO: 3025 art. I didn’t watch Macross or any of those animes, and I just didn’t like it. And then with the revised version, I fell in love with Thunderbolt. It just looks amazing. It is just everything I want in a walking tank. 

Sean: That’s a good choice. And you can get a really good one in MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries as well. 

Dmon: Well, yeah. Basically, their hero one with all the lasers.

Sean: Yeah. The ‘Top Dog.’

Dmon: Yeah, I completed the game with that as my main one, even though I had everyone else in King Crabs

Sean: As in many MechWarrior games, if you can just put a dozen medium lasers on something, you can steamroll through everything. 

All right, let’s talk a little bit about your Sarna history. So when did you first discover the wiki? And how did you rise from the ranks to your current place of honor? 

Dmon: I think it was somebody who posted a link on one of the iterations of the official BattleTech forums, and it had only been in existence for about six months at this point.

“I started doing similar sorts of stuff for editing the ‘Mech loadouts and things on the wiki, or I got an interest in the Draconis Combine units and just putting information about those.”

I’d previously mentioned that I used to make spreadsheets of all the ‘Mech stats for the computer games. I started doing similar sorts of stuff for editing the ‘Mech loadouts and things on the wiki, or I got an interest in the Draconis Combine units and just putting information about those. I was just a general, run of the mill editor.

I wasn’t particularly doing a lot—I was just picking bobs. I think it started about 2006, and I did that up until about 2017, 2018, where a lot of the old guard of the initial admin team had mostly semi-retired or things like that—people drifted away.

I’ll give you a perfect example. The article count history; so around the first of January 2016, it says in 2015 we added 548 articles to the wiki for an entire year. 

Sean: More than one a day. 

Dmon: Yeah, but previously, every single year it had been over a thousand. Whereas last year we added 7,515. The year before that, we added nearly ten and a half thousand. 

Sean: That’s quite a few. 

Dmon: A bit of a turnaround in a decade. So, yeah, everybody kinda drifted away. But a couple of people—me, Frabby, I’m not sure who else, offhand—stuck around.

I changed jobs and I had a lot of free time. Basically, I was sitting at work. Once I’d done my job, as long as I had to finish my shift, I could do whatever I wanted, and I ended up sitting there editing the wiki. I’d have a book or a novel open on one hand, and the wiki open on the other, just editing, and I kind of turned it round. And from that point, when I started doing that, it jumped from 500 new articles in that year to 700 the next year, and then it was back to one and a half thousand, and it went higher and higher every year. 

But I inadvertently changed the focus of the wiki at this point because I was doing it from the novels, from the fiction. A lot of the stuff I was adding was from fixing stuff, and I became the highest scoring editor on the entire wiki. To the point where I have now got somewhere around 90,000 edits over my career for the wiki.

Thunderbolt Second Succession War

Sean: Again, that’s quite a lot. 

Dmon: That’s a fair bit, yeah. And I accidentally turned it from a mostly game-oriented wiki to a fiction wiki. And it just snowballed from there. 

Sean: I think now it’s kind of an everything wiki. Fiction deserves as much presence on the wiki as the specific game rules or just stuff that’s mentioned in sourcebooks. I think it all matters, so I think this is a good change. 

Dmon: Oh yeah. I think it’s a fantastic change because after a few years of doing that, I got invited to become an admin. So I’ve just carried on doing what I was doing, but I’ve also kind of realized that a lot of the stuff that we had on the wiki historically—like the game stuff—we can’t have anymore.

Sean: Like the specific rules for damage or in-game effects?

Dmon: Exactly. Now, CGL has been very supportive of us and they have never told us off about any of this. This is something I’ve pushed quite heavily for off my own bat. My main inspiration was—of all things—looking at the Warhammer wikis, and we all know that Games Workshop can get quite litigious about their property. I was like, how do their wikis exist when Games Workshop doesn’t like anybody? And then I realized it’s because they’ve got no rules. 

I asked around a little bit, and then I realized that when it comes to wikis, the rules are the bits we can’t have. CGL is fine with it, but if Topps were to one day decide that they didn’t like us, they could close us down. So that’s where we’ve started exercising rules.

Now, it’s not going to be a popular move, so we’ve purposely done it quite slowly to let people get used to the idea. 

Sean: I wonder if it would be okay to have some very basic rules that have just been around forever, like a medium laser does five damage, a heat sink removes one heat, or stuff that you’d be able to intuit just by maybe reading the back of the box. But I can understand why the more complex stuff like Reflective armor or superchargers would not be okay from a copyright perspective.

“Essentially, you can’t change the wording of a rule because then you change the rule.”

Dmon: Exactly. Essentially, you can’t change the wording of a rule because then you change the rule. The heat sinks and the medium laser thing are good examples, but where do you draw the line? And there’s always going to be a push and a pull with people, especially because a lot of people who use the wiki want the rules. A lot of people use it for quick reference, like you did yourself. 

The decision was made, eventually, to have as few rules as possible simply because policing where the line is probably a job in itself. 

Sean: We’ll circle back to the state of Sarna in just a moment, but I noticed that one of your taglines is you’ve broken the wiki several times. Could you speak a little bit to that?

Dmon: Oh, I’ve broken the wiki several times by trying to do things which it isn’t designed to do. Admittedly, that’s quite a few years out of date now, but I still find it amusing. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the noble house family trees I created?

Kurita Family Tree

Sean: I remember those trees. They’re very complicated—as they should be—but yeah, I’ve seen them.

Dmon: Yep. The code for those family trees, me trying to bend it to do other things, yeah? I nearly killed the wiki at one point about 10 years ago.

Sean: Right, well, I hope things have gotten better for the wiki. How is Sarna these days?

Dmon: Well, as I’ve already touched upon with the amount of new articles we’re creating, we are doing amazing. It was seven and a half thousand new articles last year. Yes, 7,515, and 10,000 articles a year before. And yet for the last few years, we’ve been at the lowest count; two and a half thousand articles in a year, and that’s been the case for about six or seven years now. It’s always way up in the thousands, normally three or four thousand a year.

We’ve got quite a big pool of editors, probably the biggest pool of editors we’ve ever had. The Discord community is incredibly active and helpful and it’s bloody lovely. It’s probably the nicest Discord I’ve ever been in, to be honest. I know you’re in there yourself, so you know all about that. It’s nice and chilled out, and I quite often get messages from people saying they can’t believe how chilled out it is compared to most Discord servers. As I say to people, it’s got a slightly academic bent for a Discord server.

Sean: I would say so. Many channels are just project titles and it’s all very well organized. People are generally on-topic, except for the off-topic channels, of course.

Dmon: Yeah, it is. And to be honest, that’s also reflected in the wiki itself, because the wiki itself is currently standing at 59,000 articles, which is pretty big for a fan wiki. I remember being quite happy a couple of years ago that we beat the Warhammer 40K wiki to 40,000 articles. 

“I remember being quite happy a couple of years ago that we beat the Warhammer 40K wiki to 40,000 articles.”

Sean: Suck it, Warhammer!

Dmon: Exactly, especially as they are the much bigger fan base. Definitely less organized, less studious. I think we are getting close to the Star Trek wiki in size, which I think is quite impressive because they’ve got multiple films and a TV series and other things and we ain’t.  

I’ll just have a look. Star Trek is divided into two, which is weirdly the Memory Alpha—which is the canon stuff—and then Memory Beta, which is similar to the Star Wars spin-off stuff, I think. I’m not 100%, but the main Star Trek wiki has got 60,374, so, we are just 1,103 behind them. 

Sean: I think that means we just need to wait a year and we’ll be ahead. 

Dmon: Yes, definitely. 

Sean: Well, you’ve already talked about the rules changes to Sarna, where we’re moving away from recording rules. What are some of the major changes that have taken place over the past couple years that you’d like to highlight? 

Y'know, This Thing Infobox

Dmon: The other main thing which we’ve highlighted and I’m particularly proud of is we’ve started updating the info boxes. So people who don’t know what an info box is—when you click on an article, if you’re on a PC, it’s normally on the right-hand side, and if you’re on a tablet or a mobile device, it’s right at the top. It’s the box with all the bullet-pointed information points. So say you go into a ‘Mech article, it’s the bit which says what engine is in the ‘Mech, how much it weighs, the model number, that kind of stuff before you get into the meat of the article. We’ve started upgrading those and we’re about two thirds of the way through. 

Admittedly, I picked the worst example because we’ve left the ‘Mech articles last on purpose because it’s the most complicated, and it’s also arguably the most important on the entire wiki. If we screw that up, it’s not good. I don’t want to break the wiki again. 

Sean: Nobody wants that.

Dmon: But we are installing a so-called semantic wiki, which essentially allows people to do interesting searches once it’s all fully installed. So say you’re looking for a planet. We haven’t got a date of colonization for every planet in the universe, but as CGL has given us a lot of the Touring the Stars articles, we’re getting more and more. Eventually we’ll get to the point where you can use this semantic wiki to get a list in order of when every single planet in the universe was colonized. 

The theory is that if you get the dates in order, you can also extrapolate it to a map and you will be able to actually see the in-universe expansion of humanity across the stars. We’re not there yet, but we are building the technology into the wiki now to make it happen in the future, and I think that is absolutely awesome. 

Sean: I have seen that visually-impressive map project that was started a couple of years ago and that is very useful to just situate yourself in the Inner Sphere throughout the eras.

Dmon: Behind the scenes, there’s a lot more waiting in the wings that’s going to become much more useful. The other one I’ve been discussing with Deadfire is the possibility of seeing if we can get a jump calculator working because more and more planets are getting stats for how long it takes to recharge.

“Behind the scenes, there’s a lot more waiting in the wings that’s going to become much more useful.”

Like for example, in MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries you can go everywhere in the Sphere, but they go with the approach of a standard 30 days.

Sean: That game doesn’t have any differences to account for the brightness of the star. 

Dmon: No. But we’ve got a huge amount of data—we’ve got maybe half, up to two-thirds of the planets in the Sphere. We’ve got numbers now. And if we were willing to fudge it and do what PGI did for the ones we haven’t got numbers, we could have a fully-functional term calculator from one side of the Sphere to the other. And it’d probably be the most accurate one ever made by anybody.

Sean: That’d be very cool. Do we have a timeline on when that’s gonna be coming up? 

Dmon: I have no idea because we’re still trying to discuss whether we can actually make it work. But if we can, yes, it will be amazing, and it’ll be all canon. Because even the generic ones where we’ve got a gap, eventually as they get filled, it’ll only get more accurate.

Sean: Very cool. Have there been any other big changes that you wanted to discuss here?

Dmon: A lot of the big changes are things we’ve done on the back end to make searches more accurate and stuff like that, which isn’t going to be interesting to most people, but it’s interesting to us. It’ll make it more useful for people.

We’ve started breaking out parts of articles for use in future projects to enhance accuracy because we’ve realized a lot of the manufacturing data of the wiki—you know, like what’s built on what planet—is fundamentally wrong. Some of them have been updated, some of them have changed, some of them are just kind of out of date. 

Draconis Combine Infobox

It’s also come to light that when FASA originally published their Hotspots books, the method we used back in the day was essentially a verbatim copy, but then you dig into the lore and you realize that it was an extrapolation of huge proportions. Basically, it was assumed that when a ‘Mech is being built on this planet in this factory, the whole thing’s being built, when in fact, it’s probably closer to the way a modern car is manufactured where very little is built entirely on site. It’s mostly all shipped in and assembled on site. 

As we’ve got more materials from CGL, it’s become very clear that there’s a huge network of trade going on. Which makes the universe seem wonderfully lived in, but it also means that a lot of our information gives the wrong impression. However, we haven’t figured out how to reverse engineer everything or try to make it usable without basically deleting the whole thing and starting over.

Sean: We’ll see where that leads us to in 2025. Now, I did get a list from Tumult & Travail for some recent updates to highlight on the wiki. From MDFification, overhauls for mid-range and minor faction pages and general cleanup efforts. What can we say about this?

Dmon: Yeah, we’ve introduced a new system of how we organize the factions into more nations. We’ve built a new info box with more information about currency and things like that, to try and make it seem a bit more like it’s a living entity rather than just a stat block.

MDF’s been doing a lot of deep dives and digging into various factions and filling in all the information. I think I saw a post from MDF the other day saying they were going to be digging into the Outworlds Alliance and giving that one an overhaul soon. Some of them are quite old and haven’t had much attention, and when we go back and look at them, they were almost verbatim taken from very, very old source books. We’ve had to literally tear them down and rebuild them.

Sean: Next up we have csdavis‘s extensive work on corporation info boxes, disambiguation, and general maintenance. 

Dmon: The disambiguation stuff is what I was saying about making the search work easier. We’ve cut down on the amount of things that confuse the search engine by organizing how we name things better. The corporations thing is new info box preparation for what I was saying about the technical debt on manufacturing. What we’re thinking of doing is separating corporations from factories. So when you’ve got a corporation—say, General Motors—we can say here’s General Motors Corporation, this is their history. But then when you go to a particular site, you don’t get the whole history of it on a planet. Their factory on this site is this, and we can start to talk about what we know is manufactured at that site, but also we can describe that site itself rather than just a corporate overview.

“We’ve cut down on the amount of things that confuse the search engine by organizing how we name things better.”

So csdavis has done a lot of the prep work in cleaning up the corporations in preparation for that split out when we’re ready for it. And then we’ve also had Till recently do all the different faction info boxes which I mentioned in the semantic wiki thing before. I think he’s nearly complete. He might have already completed it in the last week or two. 

It means that with the right prompt, you can get a chronological order of all the fiction. And I don’t mean when it was published—I mean in-universe, so what piece of fiction takes place the earliest and what’s the most recent. I know Eric, the lead of the fact-check team, has got something very similar, but he’s got a spreadsheet on the BattleTech forums. We’ve essentially stolen his thunder a little bit by building an automated one 

Sean: Very cool. That’s going to be very helpful, especially for newcomers who are going to want to stick to the chronological order of books as opposed to the publication dates.

Alaric Ward Infobox

Dmon: A lot of people seem to go by publication date, yeah. I’ll be honest, I’ve never done either. I’ve just done them as they’re published and then I’ll go back to them randomly when there’s something I’m interested in, which is often dictated by what I’m working on the wiki at that point. 

Sean: We’ve also got the ever ongoing effort of hf22, CungrVanck (which I’m not entirely sure how to pronounce), Fish, and many others, to record every character in BattleTech history.

Dmon: Yes, that’s an absolutely enormous one, which hf22 has been spearheading for about 18 months now—maybe about two years. Hf took it upon themself to spearhead it, but every single character, no matter how minor. It’s worth mentioning we’ve realized that’s probably going to be somewhere in the range of about 40,000 articles in itself when it’s done, which is fairly insane.

You’ve got the major players, like everyone’s favorite Victor Steiner-Davion or Alaric Ward. Those people have great, big, deep, detailed articles, but some of them, you might get a character who’s only mentioned once in a throwaway line, or even just as a name drop somewhere, they’re still getting an article.

Why? Because we’re a lore wiki. I know six months ago, someone found a character in a far more recent sourcebook who’d been name-dropped and it turned out to be a character in one of the very earliest books. If you didn’t have the wiki’s ability to cross-collate information, I don’t think anybody would have noticed except for the person who originally wrote the character into the more modern sourcebook.

I’ve spoken to CGL many times and a lot of them will do the most obscure callbacks that you will never get unless we had a resource like Sarna to say, who is this person?

Sean: I can see that being very important. 

Dmon: And it’s also good fun because there is a very, very nerdy thrill when you find this little callback. It’s like, I’m probably the only person who knows this exists now. 

Sean: Precisely. At that point, using the wiki is admitting defeat. 

Dmon: Yes. 

Sean: All right, and finally, the last one: Conn Man‘s work on the Firestorm pods. I recently spoke to Virtual World Entertainment about that, and Nick told me that’s something they definitely want to have documented.

Dmon: That’s something I know virtually nothing about being over the other side of the world. I’ve never even seen one of these pods. I’m so jealous when I see people talking on the forums and the Discord, “Oh, yeah, I remember playing them.” Fifteen-year-old me would have cut off his own leg to do that. 

“We are also about historical preservation. We’ve got a duty to preserve some of the history.”

It’s one of the amazing things about the wiki. I know I mentioned pivoting towards being more fiction-based, but we are also about historical preservation. We’ve got a duty to preserve some of the history. Stuff like the Firestorm pods, even though people went and played on them, a lot of the people who were involved in their creation aren’t anymore. They’ve gone on to do other things, working in different industries. They’re not necessarily part of the BattleTech community anymore. 

We need to bring together all these strands, the people who are still involved in the BattleTech community, or even stuff like manuals. I randomly found online copies of the manual that they used to give people when they signed up, which I didn’t even know was a thing until I found it. It gives instructions on how to use the pods and stuff, and that kind of thing is important to preserve.

Now, obviously that manual I found is preserved on the internet, but it’s not preserved somewhere somebody interested in it is going to be able to find it with ease. Even just information about the different iterations of the software and the hardware involved; there’s YouTube videos about people restoring hardware, and there’s a little community and they help each other out. But if you’re not in that little community and you’re just reading about it, you don’t know any of this. 

That’s the kind of interesting, arguably really important historical documentation we should have on the wiki. Maybe we don’t need the technical details of every single iteration, but the fact that there are multiple iterations is worth talking about.

BattleTech Pods at Adepticon 1

Sean: I’d agree with that. Alright, let’s now move on to the new year. What projects does Sarna have running for 2025? Or what projects will begin in 2025?

Dmon: Well, the ones that I’m hoping to kickstart in 2025 are the ones I’ve already talked about, about breaking out the manufacturing sites into their own thing, where we can hopefully slay a demon which has haunted the wiki for several years at this point. We’ve also got a new info box for real people coming about. I’m hoping to get more of the authors interested in joining us and telling us a little bit about themselves on the wiki.

End of the day, if you write books or stories about BattleTech and someone clicks on your name, they clicked on it because they’re interested in who you are. I know some of them also write novels for Shadowrun or Star Trek or even Star Wars, so give it a shout out. Use the resources of Sarna to promote yourself if you’re one of those authors. Even if you’ve only ever written BattleTech, still tell us about yourself.

Sean: And authors are allowed to edit their own Sarna pages, right?

Dmon: Yes, they are. I’m actively encouraging it because we don’t know who they are. We know they exist, but unless they tell us, how do we know? Some of them are active on Discord already, but even those guys, I encourage them to join in.

Also, I don’t mind if the authors want to edit the wiki itself and correct some of the mistakes or misconceptions we may have put in because they know how we think. They would know how they wanted a character to be interpreted at the end of the day.

“We’ve been working on photographs of all the MechWarrior: Dark Age miniclicks pieces. For a long time it was the dirty redheaded stepchild of BattleTech and everybody hated it, and the thing is, I quite liked it.”

Another big one is what Deadfire is working on, which I’m hoping he’s going to launch at some point this year. We’ve been working on photographs of all the MechWarrior: Dark Age miniclicks pieces. For a long time it was the dirty redheaded stepchild of BattleTech and everybody hated it, and the thing is, I quite liked it. Some of the ‘Mechs looked ugly, but some of them looked amazing. I really liked the Centurion, which, funnily enough, became the standard Centurion, because I think it looked better. But I really like the Crimson Hawk as well.

Sean: I love that ‘Mech.

Dmon: But yeah, that is hopefully going to be a huge thing. The only site I’m aware of is WarrenBorn, which was active when MechWarrior: Dark Age was in production, and it’s aimed at collectors, but I don’t believe it’s updated anymore.

Sean: Yeah, I don’t think so. I think what we have is what we’re ever going to have. 

Dmon: Basically, yeah. We recently had somebody pipe up on the Discord and say that I think it was their father who was one of the named characters that came with one of the ‘Mechs because they’d won a regional championship or some such. And it was like, there you go! That is a cool little  piece of information, and they showed us some screencaps of things like the trophy and stuff like that. That’s where the wiki comes into its own, because it can preserve history of that kind as well, but we need the people to bring it to us in the first place.

Sean: Righton. Was there anything else about the wiki you wanted to talk about?

Dmon: No, I think that’s it for now. Those projects might not sound super exciting—I don’t know, it’ll vary from person to person. But to me, I’m excited for those things and what it will do for the wiki and its usability, and our ability to do even more in-depth information is enormous. So I’m excited. 

Sean: I’m excited for some of these changes as well. Alright, nobody gets out of these interviews without answering some fun questions, so I’ve cooked up a few for you. You get to wave a magic wand and add or change anything to Sarna. What would it be? 

Dmon: What I would add to Sarna is about 300 more editors who are good at their job.

Sean: That’s a good answer. That’s a very good answer. 

Dmon: And who will edit every single day as well? Give me that and in a year we’ll be beating Wikipedia for article numbers, never mind Star Trek.

MechAssault

Sean: Well that was a pretty easy one then, we’ll move on. Sarna does deal with some apocryphal content as well; I think all the MechWarrior games are apocryphal, and there’s a lot of joke content that gets released for April Fools such as the UrbanMech LAM.

If you could take one apocryphal page on Sarna and canonize it, which one would it be? 

Dmon: Oh, now that is a hell of a question. What I would do just to annoy people, I’d find a way of making the plotline of the original MechAssault game canon.

Sean: That would cause so many problems. 

Dmon: Oh, it would. Nah, I’d probably go with something like it’s some sort of in-universe media in a similar way to the cartoon. But I’d be happy with it just because yeah, it’s so wrong. It’d be right to do just for the annoyance factor. 

Sean: All right, and last question I have for you. A BattleTech limited series—much like the cartoon perhaps—is announced. When and where is it set, and who stars?

Dmon: Ooh, let’s see. I’m gonna cop out and I’m gonna say, it’s at the beginning of the 4th Succession War, it’s gonna follow Hanse Davion, and I’m gonna say… I reckon Russell Crowe would make a good Hanse Davion. 

“I reckon Russell Crowe would make a good Hanse Davion.”

Sean: Current Russell Crowe or younger Russell Crowe? 

Dmon: Maybe about 10 years younger. I think that would play someone about the same age as Hanse Davion would be.

Sean: Well, unfortunately, that would require a time machine as currently we are very firmly in the Daddy Crowe era.

Dmon: Oh, no, no, no! If we’ve got the technology to CGI dead movie stars into movies, we can de-age people. 

Sean: That’s a good point. I forgot about that. Well, that’s everything I had. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about beyond the wiki?

Dmon: The wiki is everything, really. Well, it is for me anyway, but that’s me. I might be biased.

Sean: In that case, thanks so much for being our interviewee for Sarna’s state-of-the-wiki, and I hope that all these projects go off without a hitch!

Dmon: I hope so, and I hope that people are interested in them, because as I said, I’m excited. I don’t know if everybody else will be excited, so hopefully they will. 

Sean: We’ll find out! Thanks again, Dmon!

Dmon: Brilliant.


Thank you, Dmon, for giving us a preview of projects and what we can expect in 2025. If you’d like to talk to Dmon or help with editing or any ongoing projects, join us on Sarna’s Discord.

And as always, MechWarriors: Stay Syrupy.

stay syrupy

Share this:

This entry was posted in Community, Fan Projects, Interviews on by .

About Sean

Hooked on BattleTech at an early age, Sean honestly can't remember whether it was the cartoon, the serial novels or the short-lived TCG that did him in. Whatever it was, his passion for giant shooty robots never died, so now he writes about the latest and greatest in 'Mech related news.

9 thoughts on “Sarna In 2025 – A (Slightly Late) Preview With Wiki Admin Dmon

  1. Trace

    This is a terrible choice. I use Sarna for this stuff all the time as a GM and a fan. This is a horrible change to the wiki.

    Reply
    1. Deadfire

      It’s a few things, but fully a volunteer decision, and remember the wiki is run by said volunteers.
      – The amount of data that we could have is way more than any of us could keep up on. (Such as why we sort of have an unwritten rule of “Don’t out-MUL the MUL” )
      – We have been removing rules in favor of just noting where they could be found, as we hardly have enough active editors to keep those updated, let alone the amount of errata we would have to go through.
      – The wiki has always had an issue of people not wanting to get involved with editing due to multiple reasons, so of it being the task seems to be out of their personal ability or comfort zone. Certain rules are very hard to keep up with and have changed from editions. Giving people another roadblock to editing isn’t something we want to do.
      – Many users have issues with what is called “ownership of content” as it seems many people only want their expression presented and hate having pages they have made or contributed too changed in any way. Game Rules can be tricky in having the language used convey exactly what a rule is trying to say, which leads to many different (sometimes just as correct) ways of looking at it. Thus it can become a very frequent user conflict issue.

      Reply
  2. Joshua Bressel

    Removing the rules will get obnoxious, particularly with things pike mech quirks, and the quick weapon references. It will diminish the utility. Why not just talk to Randall Bills, and ASK HIM if he’s OK with how it is?

    Reply
  3. Christian

    Not a fan of the decision to exorcise the rules. It’s always been quicker and more convenient to hit Sarna than digging out my paper rulebooks. And not every .pdf is fully searchable.

    My biggest gripe with Sarna is the amount, placement and obnoxiousness of ads on the site. Those full-page ads between articles are annoying as – ‘scuse my French – FUCK. As are those quarter-screen sized video ads which pop in from the side.

    Guys, if you need money to keep the lights on, why not ask the community to pitch in? Set up a Patreon or something, plonk down a “Give a tip” link somewhere or do literally ANYTHING ELSE but slather more ads onto the site. No one likes ads and I’ll happily pay you to make them go away.

    Reply
    1. Serrin Teakwood

      Yeah, I actually can’t use the site on mobile because some fullscreen ads just can’t be closed. They’re supposed to close when you scroll, but they just… don’t. I have to use the desktop version and zoom in real close because at the very least all those full-sized ads have actual Xs to close them out!

      Reply
    2. Kantoken

      You guys aren’t serious, are you?

      If you are, might I direct you to the AdBlock plugin to remove ads from your browser on your PC, and the actual AdBlock browser app on your phone?

      Reply
  4. Jeremy Saklad

    I think removing the rules is a good idea, especially since they’re often outdated and that causes more problems than they solve.
    I absolutely love the semantic web, and having Semantic Wiki support in Sarna will be awesome. Once you get that kind of thing rolling, it works like magic.
    MekHQ already has an impressive jump calculator going. I’m afraid Sarna’s system will have to settle for a tie.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.