The Concert of the Sphere - A BattleTech AU

[Steve]

Decided to do a master thread for ease of linking..


Concert of the Sphere - A BattleTech AU
By: Big Steve, based on material done by... quite a few other people as well as myself.

Based off of the 2020 "From The Ashes: Shattered Sphere" Grand Strategy Role-Playing Game by Slacker


Background

The "Concertverse" BattleTech AU is drawn from the webforum-based Grand Strategy RPG From The Ashes: Shattered Sphere (v. 1), played from April to December 2020 on the Spacebattles.com forums.  With mechanics based on the original setting From The Ashes games of the same type, the basis was for players to create a state of twenty worlds in the Inner Sphere or Near Periphery, establish that state's military, and then expand to increase their resources (in income and industrial base, referred to as Production Lines), ultimately coming into conflict with one another.

Among other things, this accounts for some of the backstory elements, as players sometimes went deep into explaining matters for how they developed into the game-start states they were.  Another factor is that some of the players were there to play a GSRPG, not necessarily because they were fans of BattleTech, or even if they liked it, familiar with intricate detail.  As a result, because GSRPGs often employ Create Your Own Nation mechanics and people pursue aesthetics and naming they prefer, some of the states that resulted can seem major outliers and not at all what experienced BTech fans would expect from the setting.  The set up of the Fall of the Great Houses can certainly explain things, allowing for unpredictable social and cultural evolutions, but the resulting names can perhaps cause some head scratching by non-players viewing the information. 

The backstory can be found in detail in Special Era Report 3142, but suffice to say, Kerensky died ahistorically early, no Exodus, and the Great Houses wrecked each other in the 1st Succession War to the extent the 2nd War broke them, allowing for a multitude of new, smaller interstellar states to eventually form from the resulting chaos.  Eventually, in the 31st Century, these player-made states consolidated and rebuilt enough that most tried to violently expand and brought about the Second Age of War.

As this is derived from said game, the conflicts and events that took place in the opening years of the Second Age of War relied a lot on player choices and actions.  Alliances made and broken, conflicts launched for opportunity, etc.  Players came and left, or had their states destroyed, and some of the alliances formed became the basis for the post-game timeline.

Said post-game timeline, starting from about mid-3038 onward, is about 66-80% me and the rest others telling me what they feel they'd have done in certain bits.  I tried to remain truthful to both the players' depictions of their societies and how events would or could go, especially in later generations when new leaders and new influences would be present.  I did not please everyone, I'll admit, and others didn't care either way.

Some of the other events were established by common player choice, like the Federated Suns absorbing the Brethren of the Stars through a royal marriage, with the latter influencing heavily the restructured institutions even if the structure looks to be all FedSuns (a new empowered legislature for one).  That was entirely the Brethren/FedSuns players and a (never realized) concept for a silly post-game epilogue RP (namely people would be invited to create concepts for the many children of Long Tom Silver, the Brethrens' ruler and the most successful pirate in history, one of which would be wed to Victoria Davion and bring about the personal union of the realms).

Either way, back in January 2021, when the game was freshly over but I felt the setting still churning in my head, I had some discussions and musings with my eventual co-writer, Captain Orsai from Spacebattles.com.  From these I wrote up the opening chapter (really prologue) of Emergence, and things have progressed from there.  I do not know how much I will do for this setting either with the crossover or as stand-alone material, but whatever has been done is going to be linked on this document.


Map

Based on the well-made gruese.de map of the 3025 Inner Sphere this map is from adapting that map's coding for use in the 2020 Shattered Sphere game.  One of the coders, who posts on SB.com as Secretariat, helped me put together my own version to alter into the map depicting the 3142 Inner Sphere of our game's setting, as I imagined it might develop.

Note that I am not a javascript coder, because I'd love to be able to fix the "rightward drift" of the state names.

The online active version of the map can be found here.



Fiction

There's a bit of fiction, most of which is the crossover with Dark Age/pre-ilClan era 32nd Century canon, but I've done a couple other stories in oother time frames, including revisiting and touching up material from the game proper.  Per forum policy those stories are only on other sites/web forums..

"Emergence", Book 1 of the Looking Glass Series
By: Big Steve and Templar87


"Crusade", Book 2 of the Looking Glass Series
By: Big Steve and Templar87

"Valhalla Calling"
By: Big Steve

"Die Rettungsaktion"
By: Big Steve and Fulton (link to AO3)

"I, Corvus: How a Fool Became Imperator of the O'Reillys"
by: Fulton, with contributions from Big Steve, edited (badly) and re--posted by Big Steve

Fluff

As a warning, these fluff pieces are written with IC POV bits that give away plot details from "Emergence" and "Crusade".

Special Era Report: 3142 - Beyond the Looking Glass
By: Big Steve

Field Manual: Royal Federation
By: Big Steve

Tales from the Concertverse
By: Big Steve

Technical Readout: 3142
By: Big Steve w/ contributions from others


Edit: Ugh, coding bugs.  My nemesis.  Aong with typoes.  They gang up on me all the time...

[Wrangler]

This cool index page! 

[FastConcentrate8]

Thanks for the topic thread. I've found the Concertverse very interesting for a while but have been struggling with finding all the individual threads.

[DOC_Agren]

thanks for this