Painting Lore: Miniatures Inspired by the Story

The Capellans get a lot of hate-rade from the Battletech community, mostly as due to there status as the smallest of the great houses and generally on the losing end of most engagements during the succession wars. But in the Second Succession War they turned a a poor choice into a moment of legend, and all it cost them was a Chancellor . The battle of Orbisonia started out well.  On Chancellor Ilsa Lia o's direction the premier house units of the Red Lancers and Prefectorate Guard were stripped of there previous Battlemechs and rebuilt almost entirely with Marauders and Warhammers .  As a result when the Red Lancers arrived on Orbisonia in 2828 and dropped on a supply depot they took a regiment of Marauders out against whatever the planets garrison had to offer - which turned out to be not nearly enough.  On the other side of the city were the Avalon Hussars who moved to engage; but not realizing the Red Lancers were running all Marauders - because who does that besid...

  If you have been reading any of my blog posts then you know I love the deep lore stories; and some of the best came out of the side panel fluff embedded in the original house sourcebooks.  I have focused a lot on House Kurita, because lets be honest - they are super fun to write about - but here is one from the equally good House Steiner Sourcebok:  The Legend of the Black Pearl. Angela Franks Angela Franks was a holo-vid star in the Lyran Commonwealth , and an avoid patriot spending her time off set running war bon drives and other such pro-war activities.  In 2853 she decided that running charity and war bond drives was not sufficient so she retired her holo-vid career and joined the Lyran Armed Forces to do her part.  Obviously this act was a great propaganda coup for the Lyran state and as such Angela was granted a Mechwarriors training pipeline and, by all accounts, excelled at it.  The Lyran propaganda machine captured her career in holo-vid realit...

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...