1) People who kept up with both product lines has a leg up. Not a bad thing, but clicktech's short life makes learning that info difficult. I have no Idea what a RISC chip is. Someone mention that the winner of a contest got to pick the first target of the titan, but I don't know if it's apocryphal.
2) I would like to know the 5 W's about the blackout and fortress. Yes, it is the central mystery of the game, but I feel the characters involved have something tangibly missing that provides context to their actions.
3) The few pages that cover those splinter factions simultaneously intrigued me as possibly interesting ideas, and wary that the concept may be flawed and can dampen the period.
1) There is no such thing as a RISC chip. In the click game, there was a gear called R.I.S.C gear that had a chance of something bad(but hardly worth worrying about) each time you used it. Wizkids never released what RISC meant. The era report reveled that it stand stand for Republic Institute for Strategic Combat.
The individual pieces of “RISC tech” we have seen since 3135, though, represent anything but the kind of übertech one would expect given the apparent goals of the Institute. In fact, what we’ve seen to date simply isn’t that advanced. If anything, the souped- up equipment we have seen or received reports of has proven only a little better than comparable “normal” gear, but with side effects that include catastrophic—often explosive—failure.
There was a world championship for mechwarrior, where the winner got to pick which faction got attacked by the Ares super heavy mechs first. The winner picked the Republic of the Sphere who happened to be on the list by accident. Kelly(the lead at the time) said "I'll make it work" and wizkids folded before we ever really found how how she was going to make it work. Pretty sure catalyst opted to just ignore it and took the story the way they wanted.
2) The black out is mostly still a mystery. There wasn't even a pattern to how they all went down. Some got hit with a virus, others just kept having critical failures even after being completely rebuilt, and some where just flat out attacked by unknown forces.
We know fortress republic was set up as a last ditch defense for a worst case scenario. It was put in place by Stone, but activated by Levin. Far as I know, we don't know how it works yet. We do know that the forces inside can get in and out, and have been doing so to conduct raids in order to keep the Republic's enemies somewhat off kilter.
3)The splinter factions made sense story wise. You had people that still strongly identified themselves with a great house. The HPG failure for them was a sign that the Republic was a failure and it gave them a good excuse to rebel. Now for Houses like Liao, any weakness was a good reason for them to reclaim their old territories. Other houses had to be careful. They had treaties in place with the Republic after all. It was better for them to sit back for a little bit and see what happened. When it was clear the republic was falling apart it was a simple matter of swooping in and taking over the planets their supporters had already taken for them.
It also worked as a good entry point for for players new to the CBT world. Instead of getting to know a whole house and it's hundreds of years of history, you had a small force with only a couple decades of history.
By the end of the dark ages, most(not all) of them are either gone or absorbed into their parent factions.
