Yes. Already in development.
Expanding on this.
I've mentioned this upcoming core rulebook realignment in multiple interviews and formats over the past year or so because it's become my new pet rock project--but I certainly don't blame the OP for not catching any of that, with so much BT info around these days. Most recently I discussed it in
the interview Ray and I did with Sarna (where good lord, I apparently could not stop running my mouth, sorry again, Sean!).
Here's the relevant portion:
Whoever’s next will have their dream products that they get to make. But for me, the thing coming up is the new Total Warfare—and we’re not gonna call it that, but I’ve shorthanded it that way. The realignment of the core books is something that Keith Hann is gonna lead. We [begin] them on the MechCommander’s Handbook, but to realign those core books and do for Classic BattleTech what Alpha Strike has with Commander’s Edition…Doesn’t mean we’re going to do one book, but that there’s going to be people who look at the BattleMech Manual as this great tabletop reference, the book you bring to games.
We can bring order to chaos. We can create a core line that makes sense; that’s fewer books, that still has the same content for the most part, but makes sense. A single book that Total Warfare once was when there was no BattleMech Manual, when there were not as many other core books. That project excites me because, you know, I still love Classic. I’m so happy to see Alpha Strike take off too. It’s been around for a quarter of BattleTech‘s existence, I like to remind people. Oh, the new Alpha Strike thing? It’s been around ten years—that’s a quarter of BattleTech‘s history, right? It just wasn’t doing anything for a long time because it took miniatures to unlock the full power of Alpha Strike and let it be what it is now.
But Classic is not dead, it’s not going away. I ride for it, and I think there is a way to make the core rulebook line more accessible, more engaging, to bring the layout stuff that we’ve learned from BattleMech Manual and other rulebooks into Total Warfare (because it was laid out almost 20 years ago).
To do that for the Classic players out there would really be great. I’ll be playing BattleTech probably the rest of my life. That’s a book I could see using for a very long time. So to get the chance to help make it is a dream.
The current "core" rulebook line's issues are ones of organization and marketing. We cannot have nine "core" rulebooks. Go count your spine art, that's what we're up to now from splitting TO and IO. (And if you think that those splits don't really count, remember that they're separate SKUs and separate things for store owners and distributors to try to make heads or tails of and have to stock.)
But no, it's not a new "edition" of BattleTech. There will be rules tweaks, as some others upthread have described. And I get that for some long-enfranchised folks, some of those tweaks are tantamount to editioning. I respect that, but objectively--they're tweaks. I also get that there are folks who would go far the other way, and want to nuke Classic BT and build CBT 2.0 from the ground up. I respect that too, but there have been pitches like that to management over the years, none have landed, and if they weren't going to rebuild during the lean times of 2014-2018, they're not going to do it now.
On organization, we can talk for a million years about where each of us would draw the lines and move the deckchairs--and sorry, we're not soliciting those opinions at this time from the public. I will say, those lines are finer than you might think. For instance, Keith is working on MechCommander's Handbook right now, what will become a new-core book eventually. And the famous p. 70 of Campaign Ops, the CBT-version of the SPAs, will be sliced out of CO and moved to MCH. But a lot of CO probably will not continue on into the new-core. We simply don't feel any obligation to keep all of this very large stack of rules in print for all eternity. That may lead to what I've called an Archive status of certain rules--they're not being deleted or crossed-out, but they're not being actively rewritten either. They're just not in print, though they'll always be available in PDF form (ideally at a very friendly price, too). Before anyone gets too worried about that concept, understand that we'd be talking about extreme corner-cases or things that don't have an obvious home in the new-core. I'm not trying to dump all of the full vehicle rules into Archive status, they do have a place.
I think we also need to be much more careful about what we're defining as "core." In the same way that fiction is trying to move away from a spine / not-spine binary, I'd like to see us have very few true new-core books, but lots of game product that modify or add onto that core experience. The "core" books now kind of do this--TechManual is only so useful if you don't plan to ever design your own 'Mech--but because they're all labeled and marketed as "core," it warps what a casual customer or store owner might believe is truly essential to the most common BattleTech experiences. For an older example, answer me this: do BattleForce / BattleForce 2 count as "core" products of their time? My opinion--I think it's a common one--is that, no, they're not core products, but they do have value and offer something. The problem is, their successor
was baked into a "core" book and I think really didn't need to be.
As far as marketing, it just goes back to what we're calling a core book. BMM has proven so popular--and we certainly have the sales numbers to prove it--because its goal was to be the book that 90+ percent of people need for 90+ percent of games. It was a success exactly because it
didn't try to be all things to all people. It had a purpose in mind, and thus had some guardrails as to what it was and was not going to be. That's what we need.
Because truthfully, when I say "new-core," that might even be overstating it. I've seen other posters on this thread float their breakdowns, up to a "book four," "book five."
You know how many books I'd like to see in the new core lineup?
One.
Just one.
With a set of supplements, clear in their purpose, easy to understand and market, and useful to build onto that book to take your game in the direction(s) you want it to go.