Hello.
I suppose it's a sign of how little attention I've been paying to the new release announcenents on the forums, or how little I expect them to equate to what the distributors up here end up getting to the actual store*, but I was genuinely suprised to see the print copy of The Wars of Reaving at the local FLGS yesterday. I didn't realise the book was actually in development, let alone set for publication.
(They also got the Reunification War book in, but I could only go for one book this time.)
The first thing I had to say is that, while the idea of the Wars of Reaving was around, this book felt like the first time in a long while that I was reading a "new" history. While events like Operation KLONDIKE were fascinating to read about, that book seemed to mainly flesh out a lot of what was already fairly well established as happening in that era; and as for the Jihad itself, a lot of its goings-on were in a sense spoilered by the Dark Age material published elsewhere. In the case of the Wars of Reaving, however, even in the Dark Age there was a veil of mystery hanfing over the Home Clans; now, it feels like the first truly new set of events has been added in to the setting.
One detail I really like about the book is how the borders go; starting with the ful 20 Clans from KLONDIKE, with a message meant to be handed down to their successors, a message gradually worn away as so many of the tiles are re-drawn, removed, wiped clean, or smashed into ruin. (Even the little detail of showing the faded symbol of an Absorbing Clan just as certain Clans are removed or replaced; very clever indeed.)
However, one thing I'm a bit disappointed at is with the maps. Both have the background colour of the terrain areas too closely matched with the text used to name each system; it's hard to make out the black text agaisnt the dark grey colours. Plus, on the 3067 map, it's really eye-straining to try and read the names of the scattered worlds on the Deep Periphery cutaway; some of the letters look like they have streaks cut across them.
As for the long-term impact of the changes in this book, I'd be most interested personally to see how the Hansa will deal with the increasingly more-than-lukewarm water it's suddenly finding itself in; hopefully the prospect of a return to the Deep Periphery in a future book will be helped by the significant shifts in the regional balance of power this book lays out.
On a wider note, a part of me wonders how much of an effect the Reaving will have on the broad Clan fanbase. With so many losses, Annihilations, Abjurations and Absorptions, will long-standing fans of certain Clans feel disenfranchised with the loss of their faction of choice; or perhaps, will they become focused on the time periods in which they felt most at home in, ignoring the later books?
(In essence, will the Reaving do to the Clanners what the Clan Invasion itself did to the Spheroids; divide those who embraced the changes from others who cut their interest in Battletech off at the point just before they's have to pay attention to them?)
In all, it's an excellent book, and one which seems to be the first in a long time to really define something "new" (if I'm not making a maess of how to describe it); though I wish the maps had been better tailored to greyscale.
Oh, and are there official colour images of the new Scorpion and Lion logos anywhere?
*While the store gets in a fair amount of Catalyst books, there are a few, like JHS:Terra, which are supposedly released but which never showed up. Unless they are still PDF only?
