Scale? :D
The sphere is approximately 198 LY across.
Also for those who homebrew up crossovers (or as close as BT will ever get), what CANNOT be included?
The goal is really just to have a situation that can work and play with the rules of the BattleTech universe, and be fun while doing so. Remember the roots and the lore of the setting, and bear in mind that the denizens of the Nebula can come from any time period from the Age of War through the Dark Age, but the more recent you get, the less drift from the norm they should have. Cataclysms and conflict can change them, to be sure, but any new societies and politics should be built upon something rooted in BT lore, leaving at least some trace behind. If that disaster is recent, the setting will still be in an unstable flux. If not, it should be reaching or at a new equilibrium based on how much they lost or got set back by the various disasters. By comparison, a group that just got there and suffered NO crises will basically be another marooned group from the Inner Sphere.
(Toreel recalls the Inner Sphere as some ancient forgotten realms of myth, but retains languages and cultural features that would not be wholly unheard of on any low-tech Inner Sphere backwater, while their altered bioforms hint at Star League-era gene-modding. Meanwhile, the AutoMechs of Syberia retain a resemblance to and the construction standards for Star League-era BattleMechs, but only ape the appearance of personalities via clever programming and randomized scripting on what is basically a deviated form of robotic drone tech. And then there's the hyper-populated Star Empire, whose tech is actually severely inferior to the Inner Sphere because they got stranded there sometime in the 2200s, before K-F tech, weaponry, and ship design reached full maturity--and the 'Mechs they've developed are only reaching pre-Star League utility in the 3100s!)
Try and work the tech drift based on what's reasonable in this setting, and try to avoid too much power creep; otherwise it won't likely be fun at all for any "normies" who cross paths with your uniqueness. It's okay to challenge your players, but if they can't have an impact, why would a story with them involved even be interesting? Give some hard limits as well; the magic and superhero stuff in the Nebula are restricted to their worlds (even though the "why?" of it is never explained at all, and theories abound that some of it isn't magic at all, but tech cosmetically made to look magical).
Meanwhile, most of the space-capable groups are sublight-only, which keeps them containable to just a system or two, so they can't immediately corrupt the entire nebula zone. (If the answer to their needs literally lies next door, how long could a resource-deprived faction remain so once they learn how to jump through space again?) IE's stranded ships are perhaps the only viable visitors who can "cross the realms" as a result of this, making them a vehicle for the audience and a neutral faction who can observe and slightly corrupt things as they go on a small scale, but they didn't bring shipyards to keep their JumpShips going, any more than all the other stranded peoples here did, so it's just a matter of time before they have to settle someplace.
Aliens are particularly hard to force in as TRUE aliens, given the way the BT universe HATES the concept at a core level, but there are workarounds like bio-modified humans and/or mutations that tweak the genome juuuuust enough to make it different. (As such, human-normative settings, such as most fantasy realms and Star Trek, where just about everyone has two arms and two legs, all in the same places, are easier to deal with than ones in which every species is wholly incompatible and unrelated to the human experience.) The Genecaste might have a chance here, even though they're almost certainly not a real or relevant thing to the actual BT universe.
Special Note: While the Tetatae are BT canon, the fact that my most serious attempt to produce a Halloween-theme adventure featuring them in a far-future Inner Sphere was STILL considered to radical for CGL to buy and publish it should underscore just how extreme the anti-alien bias of the core setting truly is; I could get away with a mock alien invasion story for the War of the Tripods, but when I brought in the one sapient non-human species we KNEW existed, it was still a no-fly zone, even as a joke.]
Keep all these things in mind, and if you can justify a way to get there using the BT setting and technology as a starting point, while avoiding the pitfalls I described above, then your idea has as good a chance at fitting into the CNAZ (California Nebula Anomalous Zone) as any of the ones I actually published!
Hope that helps.
- Herb
