Painting Lore: Miniatures Inspired by the Story

Crystal Valley before the Battle The Succession Wars evolved over time from power and territory grabs to being more about the technology of the star league and who would control the majority of it at any one time.  While the First Succession War focused more on planets and how to make them into radiological wastelands, there were still scrambles for the remains of the Star League weapons and technology depots abandoned by Kerensky's exodus .  Tyrfing was one such case - and it was a prize big enough that it degenerated into a five way battle between all the major houses. Castle Brian The planet was laid to waste during the Amaris Civil war , with the defending castle brian 's reduced to cracked shells by nuclear weapons and orbital fire.  The environmental conditions on Tyrfing degenerated, and were only further degraded by the First Succession Wars fighting there.  The result is that conventional forces, not sealed inside pressurized cockpits of Battlemechs or Aero...

The First Succession War was a war of atrocity and war crimes, full of mass murder and nuclear weapons, orbital bombardment and general mayhem.  I have often thought about how realistic is it, the prolific use of nuclear and chemical weapons to destroy whole worlds.  After much reflection, and perhaps disturbingly, it seems all to likely that once one side if no longer dependent on the same air, water and atmosphere as the enemy that resorting to weapons of mass destruction seems like a lot lower threshold.  Scorched earth tactics employed as far back as the American Civil War and the mass starvation tactics of the siege of Leningrad are low level examples of how one can see the immediacy of now overriding moral codes.  Chemical weapons were employed as late at the 1980s in large scale combat during the Iran-Iraq war, and in recent times in lesser amounts in Syria and Kurdish regions of Iraq.  Time will tell if the last major taboo of modern times, nuclear weap...

The Eridani Light Horse ranks among the most respected, and famous, mercenary commands of the Inner Sphere.  The unit, dating back to the star league era, is unique in its organization and employment of combined arms units at the company level - unlike virtually every other unit in the Battletech universe.  For this reason alone I enjoy this unit, but they also have one of the most visually appealing-yet-makes sense paint schemes of any in the game, which makes them a pleasure to both paint and see played on a game board.  While this unit has a long and storied tradition I ended up settling on the battle for Felannin II as my backdrop for my first foray mostly because I had started painting the Arkab legion without a plan, and retro-actively needed a lore backdrop.  Ah, when we fail to plan and all that... While I have retrograded my projects back in the timeline I wanted to make a complete entry for the Felannin II campaign and went way back in the lore to the or...

This Azami Mech-Jock is NEVER going to live down being kicked in the face by a Scorpion. I have always enjoyed the many independent brigades of the DCMS ; they bring color and flavor to what on the surface is a totalitarian monolith of Japanese cultural traditions.  Once the original source material moved beyond the Imperial Japan tropes and really delved into the character of the realm, most obviously in Wolves on the Boarder, it really began to take shape.  One of the more interesting facets of the DCMS has always been the Azami Warriors of the Arkab Legions . This original concept was clearly grounded in some western orientalism of the early 80's in which it was originally dreamed up.  Some of the source materials talks about the Azami settled hot dry worlds because it reminds them of there Terran homes, even though I would imagine any world habitable by man likely has some deserts - and no settlers would choose to bypass a lush water rich world for a desert one. ...