Did the Word of Blake do any noble acts?

[Sartris]

if your solution to save the house is to light it on fire and are only left with ash, your process was not great regardless of your intentions.

[Renard]

But I will not pity them, except for taking the role of ever hated archenemy in a fictional universe. Their very nature was designed to be hated, and it would be a pitiful fate of course. But, in Battletech unverse they did gone so far starting to the scorpion. Else even before that.

I can buy the idea of a secular religion that revolves around tech and humanity's danger to itself. That goes all the way back to Asimov's Foundation trilogy. I could be convinced to even like the WoB and Comstar if they had a very rigid code of non-interference and neutrality, but also had to balance that with some kind of peace-keeping mission. Imagine an interstellar "blue helmets" UN peacekeeping faction that has genuine faith in its necessity to keep humanity from wiping itself out. You could build a set of beliefs, liturgy, and secular-universalist-type generalized religion that has good parts and obvious internal contradictions that make it a dramatic element of the setting. But WoB seemed never to be this? Someone mentioned an afterword to a book where someone was positive about WoB, and... I'm going to need more than that to call them morally grey.

I suspect the storytelling cycle in battletech is the problem? When factions become too powerful, the writers nerf that faction hard. Eliminating clans, the Jihad and destruction of most merc units/total nerf of Wolf's Dragoons, breaking up FedCom, fall of the Republic, etc. It's dramatic, but the mortality of factions rather than on-going rivalries and betrayals means the story demands villains. You only root for WoB or Smoke Jaguar to get destroyed if they've crossed some lines and it seems like the narrative demands justice.  Working backwards from that narrative payoff, it's not enough that WoB fails to step in and impose the penalty for violating the Ares conventions or something, you need WoB to engage in genocide or commit its own crimes against humanity (how else do you justify wiping out or totally nerfing a faction?). So these huge map-changing events require actors to do things that probably don't make sense if you think too hard about them.

I feel like the Battletech setting works best when it is like WWI where entangling alliances led to unintended suffering and destruction, and less like WWII, where there was a clear villain that needed to be eliminated for the sake of humanity as a whole.  It's easy to root for the Allied Powers, but the Central Powers of WWI aren't evil the same way as the Axis Powers of WWII were. I can read "All Quiet on the Western Front" and sympathize with the German soldiers, but I don't think I've ever read a sympathetic story about a Nazi of any kind (who wasn't actively plotting against the regime, etc.).

[idea weenie]

One thing I wondered about, did the WoB do any good works in the Periphery, and if so, what?

Did they send around ships with school materials and tool/die shops, to help upgrade the tech level of the various planets?  I.e. if the planet is stuck in 19th century tech base because everything else has been lost, the WoB provides the books and starter tech kits to let them bootstrap?  Or if the planet is spending 99% of its industry just on maintaining its current tech base with nothing left over to increase it, the WoB ship can come in and provide the necessary slack so they can catch up.  Or a planet has a disease, and WoB provides a dedicated medical ship that can send data back to Terra for aid (with either Black Box or HPG connection).

Or fund mercenaries attacking the Clans, trading 2:1 for any Clan tech they find (i.e. The mercs provide a Clans ERPPC, the WoB trades them 2 Star League ERPPC).  Provide missions to go in and grab Clan tech/supplies on planets?  Help fund missions to simply drop off aid packages to civilians trapped behind Clan lines, but the packages have convenient phrasing about who provided the supplies, so people thank the WoB instead of one of the Houses.  Fund defensive agreements on the remaining Rasalhague worlds, so mercenaries helping out vs the Clans can get more/better contracts.

Maybe provide Mechs to Comstar at-cost, where Comstar pays for the raw materials and no profit for the Mechs being produced (but WoB sets up the toys and advertising campaign, making much more money than the program costs them).

Potentially even providing a ship or ships with supplies to help out with Operation Serpent (and for themselves, they perform Operation Paperclip on any Clan Scientists/Technicians/equipment/etc).  Be fun to have them in a story, where the WoB representative acts as though they are doing something suspicious the entire time, but in reality they aren't.  The goal is to get all the suspicion created and resolved before thy get to the Clan worlds, so they can do the suspicious stuff afterwards.

[JA Baker]

I've always said that BaftleTech works best when everything is shades of gray: ****** allies and noble enemies. Each faction has its Paladins and its Rouges, its heroes and its villains.

Even people who'd traditionally be seen as the Hero can and do have dark sides and engage in questionable activities. And then, next chapter, you discover that the "Villain" is funding hospitals for kittens and calls their mum every Sunday. It made everything feel more three dimensional, more real. Because they were people, with complex characters and reasons behind what they did, not cardboard cutout tropes.

The Word of Blake never really got enough development as a faction: we had no real stories from their point of view, just snippets here and there. And, in all honesty, I think that was a mistake on the part of whoever was running things at the time.

Nothing personal, if they're reading this, but that's just how I see it.

[Deadborder]

One thing I wondered about, did the WoB do any good works in the Periphery, and if so, what?

Did they send around ships with school materials and tool/die shops, to help upgrade the tech level of the various planets?  I.e. if the planet is stuck in 19th century tech base because everything else has been lost, the WoB provides the books and starter tech kits to let them bootstrap?  Or if the planet is spending 99% of its industry just on maintaining its current tech base with nothing left over to increase it, the WoB ship can come in and provide the necessary slack so they can catch up.  Or a planet has a disease, and WoB provides a dedicated medical ship that can send data back to Terra for aid (with either Black Box or HPG connection).

They did, actually. The Word put a lot into developing the infrastructure of the Circrinus Federation during the 3060s. The built new spaceports, engaged in numerous infrastructure projects and even built them a 'Mech factory. That latter one is particularly interesting, given the amount of development that would be needed to support it.

[PuppyLikesLaserPointers]

And brainwashed the citizen. An another evil ploy of them.

[Kojak]

I'm surprised that no one has pointed out that with an ilClan about to rise, we can now confidently say that the Word of Blake was 100% right about the threat the Clans still represented, and the only faction actually willing to do what was necessary to combat it (instead of literally collaborating with the invaders like the Houses were all too willing to).

[Deadborder]

If there were any of the Word still around, they'd be all "I told you so" right now

[Elmoth]

They know. They are just not saying so because it is so obvious to anyone.

[PuppyLikesLaserPointers]

I'm surprised that no one has pointed out that with an ilClan about to rise, we can now confidently say that the Word of Blake was 100% right about the threat the Clans still represented, and the only faction actually willing to do what was necessary to combat it (instead of literally collaborating with the invaders like the Houses were all too willing to).

If there were any of the Word still around, they'd be all "I told you so" right now

And I will shoot its mouth then say to the protein mass that, 'You never were right, for it was you what prevent us to have the strength to prepare, and it was you that is the much, much serious threat against the humanity.'

They have no right to protest, for it was them who ARE the even worse threat.

It is no more than a serial killer for plasure says that 'you must stop the robber!' Yes, we will stop the robber, but not before exterminate the serial killer.

[Bosefius]

Sigh, I'm starting to sound like a broken record, aren't I?

Locked pending review.