Episode 33
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecH_PKASoe819th November 2024
Guest: Joshua Franklin, BattleTech developer, Hot Spots: Hinterlands developer
News:
-CGL “may be doing something special” for Black Friday, it will be announced via the mailing list and then via social media
-PAX Unplugged is coming up soon, a list of “fun stuff” to be shared is being compiled. A list of panels and games will be announced soon
-Hot Spots: Hinterlands street date is the 27th of November. It releases on the CGL store on Black Friday
-The first big thing Joshua wrote for BattleTech was the Alpha Strike rulebook. He’s been working on the MUL and other volunteer projects before this.
-He hadn’t done any writing before this, he joked that his English instructors would be surprised that he was writing professionally in any capacity.
-He had decided to do his own compilation rulebook for Quickstrike, the Alpha Strike predecessor and when CGL decided to do a standalone rulebook for the game someone pointed out that he’d already basically done one.
-He’s been into BattleTech since the late 80s, he tended to swing between D&D and BattleTech and he’s been on the BattleTech end for a long time.
-Working on the MUL let him propose ideas that ended up in the Combat Manuals. He was credited as an assistant developer but he says that was an overstatement.
-He then wrote Turning Points Vega (War of 3039)
-Ray then asked him to work on the new Tukayyid book that became part of the Kickstarter. That was his first full developer credit.
From there he worked on the Force Manuals and Hot Spots: Hinterlands
-He’s more of a rules writer but for Hinterlands he gave the hot spot writers guidelines on what elements to use and then approached other writers to do the fiction and fluff.
-His early games were very much in the scavenger 3rd succession war vein, the players would have to capture units if they wanted to upgrade for example. That’s always been a favoured way to play and he often tries to capture that in his books
-A favourite session of his was an Alpha Strike event he ran for the Mercs Kickstarter launch party. It was a similar vibe to the Grinder but scaled for Alpha Strike. So he had 8 players running 2 mechs each, 4 objective tokens in the board and each player had a different thing to do with the tokens - one had to hold them, one destroy, one steal, one drop off supplies, etc. He loves when games provoke conversation between the players
-Rem mentioned a similar moment at Gamehole con where she joined a grinder an hour from the end, there had been no kills so she joined in an Atlas and put a bounty on herself to create that cinematic moment of the Atlas cresting a hilltop and all the other mechs turn as one.
-The core idea for the book came from Ray, to try and recreate the Chaos March vibe, that player-sized units could get involved and feel like they can make a difference. The cover image is a merc called the Sand Wyrm, a character you can recruit. The whole idea with the Hatamoto-chi in a ghille suit is that they’ve been stuck on a planet for over a decade and they offer to work for you if you can get them off-world.
-The heart of the book is the thirteen hot spots, each is a different world in the Hinterlands with a conflict going on. Each side in most of these worlds is hiring mercs, and the idea is that the games will be two player merc units fighting, one for each side.
-Some Hot Spots are player vs enemy, and in that case the player controlling the enemy side gets paid anyway, the idea is they have a quiet contract.
-There are even a couple of Hell’s Horses-centred Hot Spots, allowing a player to play as the Horses too.
-The first step in product development was working out the Hot Spot system. Everything down to determining maps, force composition and the like. Joshua then got some writers to trawl through Tamar Rising to find some conflicts where the end result wasn’t confirmed, and then figure out why there were fights on those worlds, who was hiring mercs and why.
-There’s a whole chapter on Almotacen, a planet the 21st Centauri Lancers liberated and realised they had to stay around to prevent the pirates from moving back in. They start a hiring hall and this is the home base for all the mercs in the campaign. The book details a lot of notable personalities on-world, and the book presses on the moral issues the Lancers face. There are no RPG-specific rules in the book but the idea is to have idea hooks for RPGs as well as narrative BattleTech play
-Bryan Young wrote the opening fiction, Stephen Toropov worked out the Almotacen stuff.
-Hot Spots: Hinterlands had a lot more prep work compared to Tukayyid, they had a better idea of what the format of the book would be ahead of time, as a result they feel that the playability is better. Joshua feels that the results one can get out of Tukayyid are wilder than in Hinterlands.
-The relative lack of detail on the Hinterlands compared to Tukayyid meant they had a lot more creative freedom on what they could do.
-They had to rework some proposed scenarios to be more player-centric, removing special characters or units that would be quite powerful and would overpower the player’s units if they were on the table.
-The book contains six maps of the Hinterlands showing the changes in territory in 3-month jumps.
-Why should people buy Hot Spots: Hinterlands? Because you have all these pretty miniatures and you should have interesting games to play with them
-The cover artist is Tan Ho Sim, he also did a lot of the interior art.
-Stephen Toropov will be on next week to talk more about Hinterlands
Q&A
-How long did it take to develop the book from start to end? About a year to work out the system, which was also used for the Mercs box. Another year for the writing, editing, fact checking, art etc. And then the six-month wait for it to arrive with players.
-Any update on tales of the Bounty Hunter? Still ongoing, hopefully out before the end of the year.
-Any update on McCarron’s Armoured Cav and Second Star League forcepacks? Randall basically got hit with what he described as every illness he dodged travelling hit him at once. He’s been sick for 2 weeks and even had to visit an ER. Rem and Randall sat down for a product planning session. At present the release schedule is
--November:
---Hot Spots hinterlands
---Essentials
--December
---McCarron’s Armoured Cavalry Assault Lance (B&N Exclusive)
--January
---Second Star League Assault Lance
---ilKhan’s Eyes Only
---Map Scale Union DropShip
---Map Scale Overlord DropShip
---Map-scale Overlord-C
---And Kickstarter items as per the most recent update
-Any timeframe for ilClan updates for the Force Manuals? They’re caught up in a production bottleneck and will hopefully be quick once the bottleneck clears
-Any update on the graphic novel? Writing is ongoing, Eldon Cowgur is working on character art.
-Any update on Audiobooks?
--Double Blind just came out, they expect to release six more next year.
-Any update on the audiobooks for Kickstarter backers? That’s still ongoing.
-There were queries around Big Kappa items
--Fiction releases? At present it’s just ebooks but Rem and John feel they should get physical copies and are working on it.
--Merc T-shirts? The production schedule on these has slowed as CGL has a lot of capital tied up in Mercs Kickstarter and they need to wait until sales come in.
--Will they still get the last Star league Forcepacks? Unsure at this point
--McCarron’s Armoured Cav forcepack will be given to big Kappas.
--Will the Star league mug be on the list? It should be. Also Rem needs to ensure it and some other mug designs get added to the webstore.
