Decided I’d try my hand at importing my HBSTech campaign merc unit to the larger BTU, and that means drafting a TO&E of my own for these guys.
As everyone who’s played the game’s campaign knows, the campaign starts you in a lance of three mediums and a light, with a backup light and MechWarrior in the
Leopard if someone (
probably Dekker) gets killed in action. So the game starts you something like this:
Markham’s/<Player Character>‘s Marauders- XO Darius Oliveira (no rank given)
- BattleMech Lance
- BJ-1 Blackjack – <Insert name here> (no rank given; presumably Commander or Colonel)
- SHD-2H Shadow Hawk – Miranda Aguilera (“Behemoth”, no rank given)
- VND-1R Vindicator – Jessica Chernovskaya (“Glitch”, no rank given)
- SDR-5V Spider – Amir Kowalski (“Dekker”, no rank given)
- LCT-1V Locust – Mohammed Benitez (“Medusa”, no rank given)
- Chief Technician Yang Virtanen (no rank given)
- Navigator Sumire Meyer (no rank given)
After the war that restored the Aurigan Coalition, which is a canon event and polity as of
House Arano (The Aurigan Coalition), the unit starts looking very different as new MechWarriors join up and new ‘Mechs and other equipment are purchased and/or salvaged. A lot of the unit here is apocrypha, but the aforementioned sourcebook does mention some MechWarriors who were members of the canon version of the unit (in-game, they’re exclusive to skirmish mode to my knowledge), who presumably retained the name “Markham’s Marauders”, and of the characters listed here, Darius is the only one who has been canonized.
But what if… the Marauders rebranded, and had been rebranded for quite some time during the war?
What if they grew to a greater strength? Purchased an extra
Leopard DropShip or two, or replaced their
Argo and
Leopard both with a more traditional
Union or other similarly-sized vessel that can carry a company’s worth of BattleMechs or more and the personnel to maintain and/or operate them?
What if they instead branched into combined arms warfare, including aerospace and more traditional ground forces in their ranks for those contracts where BattleMechs alone simply will not cut it?
I can’t pretend to truly know the canon availability of these things; I’m relatively new to this side of the verse. ;D But it’s a collection of ideas that’s been bouncing around in my head for some time, and this is extrapolating from apocryphal material in a region that, as I understand it, was actually quite low on BattleMech assets in canon at the time. I tend to go against a lot of habits that I’ve noticed people have, at least if they’re playing the video games mostly; my player character will typically drop in a JR7-D
Jenner while everyone else is in heavier ‘Mechs, and I generally try to avoid deploying assault ‘Mechs en masse, preferring ‘Mechs in the medium and heavy range. As I develop this unit for different time periods, those habits might be reflected in how everyone’s set up. Of course, by the time of ilClan, my player character, who would very likely be demoted to NPC in the context I plan to be using this unit tabletop-side, might not even be alive anymore…
But Dekker might be.I’ll need to open the game again to pull names and ‘Mechs to base my TO&E on for the Succession Wars and early Clan Invasion periods… I’d imagine they’d be barely recognizable by ilClan, though. ;D And probably pretty weak. Lots of rebuilding to be done! Or they get destroyed and disband. Depends on how my table interacts with them.
