Career Progression in BattleTech: Beyond Electrodrome
This…this right here. Three of the great joys of life: synthwave, John Carpenter movies, and Kurt Muthafuckin’ Russell.
Brothers
Lights flickered in the cockpit. The air was growing hotter and hotter, so hot he feared it would catch fire and blossom into a white-hot incendiary cloud. It caught in his throat like burning fish hooks, and his consciousness was on the verge of being dragged away.
Richie had chewed his way through the many leagues, the bugs, the bantams, the feathers, the lights, and the welters for this match and this match alone. It was never about money, though he had earned more money than his parents had ever dreamed of. It was not about glory, though he hoped his parents would have been proud. He hoped his brother Hank would have been proud. Hank.
Fucking motherfuckers.
This bout, the bout he had been seeking all these many moons, was about a man. Damian Beaumonde, last son of the Gideon Beaumonde, last member of that family of monsters that had taken everything from him. Everything.
“Damian!” he shouted, “Damian! Look at me!”. He tightened the hardened claws of his Kintaro on the Griffin’s canopy. He watched the canopy supports crumpling, armor and reinforced viewscreens spiderwebbing and collapsing slowly inward.
Richie watched his opponent through the buckling canopy, frantically working his controls to break free, like a cornered animal.
While a standard Griffin would be helpless in a clinch, long-range missiles and particle cannon rendered ineffectual even if they could be brought to bear, Damian’s ride was a heavily customized machine, a gleaming testament to excess and his family’s cutthroat greed. They had spared no expense.
Twin flamethrowers roared into the Kintaro’s throat, channeling gouts of murderous plasma up and across its glowing, slowly liquefying chest and face, heat radiating off the viewscreen as hellish torment. Machine guns and small lasers slashed and stabbed feebly at his torso while the Griffin’s hands swung desperately, chopping at his arms and digging for his deadly machine’s beating heart.
The arena marshalls were bleating at Richie over the comms, telling him the bout was over, to return to his stable, hysteria cracking the edges of their voices as they ordered him to release his opponent and to power down for passive retrieval.
“Death will not save you, Damian!” Richie bellowed, eyes flaming with hate, his fists tightening, the armored cockpit collapsing in juddering degrees. He saw the soft little creature jerk its hands down toward the area between its knees and then yank.
Flames erupted from the base of the Griffin’s neck as explosive bolts popped and booster rockets flared, separating the head from the body by a narrow disk of flame and exhaust gas that bloomed outwards and drove into the Kintaro’s face with hurricane wrath.
Powerful as full-head ejection motors were, they were no match for the Kintaro’s killing grip and the anchor of its 55-ton bulk. Richie held fast, blanketed in fire and carbon, myomer bundles as unbreakable as the thews of Beowulf, king of the Geats. He felt his machine shuddering, heard the roaring engines through its bones. Blinded by the confined thrust plume, he gripped tighter and screamed in exalted defiance, knowing he could not fail.
The motors quickly burnt through their fuel, and as the carbonized haze and smoke bled away from the space between them, Rickie’s eyes drilled into the terror-whitened orbs of Damian’s twisted soul.
“Even in death” he growled, “you will never escape me!”
The Kintaro’s heavily modified claws tightened and sang, servos and synthetic muscles driving the armor-piercing claws inwards with irresistible force, punching through the internal bulkheads that surrounded the cockpit. He saw Damian scream silently as he drove the Kintaro’s palms together.
Richie’s neurohelmet bathed his nervous system in sensory information: the sensation of the Griffin’s head imploding, the sensation of the world inside being compacted into inaudible screams and wetness with no resistance. The Griffin slackened, its decapitated, dead-weight body falling away to thunder into the ground at his feet.
He stood there, arms outstretched, holding the pulverized head as if in offering. He did not hold it as an offering to the crowd. Let them think it was theirs, but it was not. It was not an offering to any divine being or arcane “gods of battle”.
He held it aloft as an offering.
To Hank.
The temperature in the cockpit had spiked to deadly levels. Warning sirens told him that most of his heat sinks had been shot to pieces and that his engine core’s shielding had been all but destroyed by the flurry of punches that had gouged into his midsection. Sweltering doom flooded the cockpit as if he had been submerged in the Lake of Fire.
Lights became greasy smudges and constricted at their edges, darkness filling the spaces between the brightness. Gleaming flames licked up from the bottom of his shattered trophy, barely visible through the wall of smoke rising before his canopy. The smoke spread the darkness, pushed it outwards, fed it as the heat rose. It was a black conflagration, incendiary night, hotter, hotter, hotter…
Blackness swallowed him like the ocean, and he sank, downwards, for forever.
Until there was nothing. No dreams. No death.
Nothing.
A formless eternity of nothing.
Until there was a beep.
One beep, with echoes wrapped in cotton.
Then a string of beeps.
A string of beeps floating on a dim sea of dull aches.
Beeping and dull aches. Slow movements and the smell of a medical ward. Dim light to the left. Light growing, fading, growing, but filled…with…darkness. And something else.
A man-shaped shadow stood wreathed in light. In the doorway. Hooded. Trench coat. Bulky yet athletic. Arm outstretched with something metallic glinting in its hand.
A voice reached out from the dark form, low and dreadful, muffled yet echoing sharply.
“Any last words, Richie?”
Richie lifted his hand as if he were lifting a planet, and held it out stretched in a forestalling gesture.
“I’m sorry…sorry I killed him.” he rasped.
The gun in the figure’s outstretched hand wavered.
“…Because I’d love to do it again and again”.
The Career Progression PDF
Below is a link to the PDF I have created detailing the rules of career progression within the BattleTech: Beyond Electrodrome module. The rules include the basics of earning Reputation Points (RP), earning Upgrade Points to unlock sponsorships, spectacle upgrades, wildcard upgrades, stable upgrades, and reputation upgrades, all to add spice and flair to your BattleTech games.
Career Progression PDF
Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their fans.
Check ‘er out and let the good times roll.
Also, I make mention of sponsorships in the Career Progression PDF. And while I have a slew of animal units (crana and trachazoi and megasaurs, oh my!) ready to get pumped into the Spectacle Cards/Assets, I’m going to prioritize sponsorships, just to make sure we have something to play with. Here’s an example of what to expect.
Missile Sponsorships
A glimpse of what is to come, and the wild beauty and murder-mayhem of sponsorships.
Upcoming sponsorships will include autocannons, PPC’s, lasers, melee weapons, engines, gyros, heat sinks, jump jets, cockpits, armor, flamers and plasma weapons, sensors, life support systems, comms systems, targeting & tracking systems, actuators, and whatever the hell kind of madness my Noble Patrons come up with.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Also. If you’re enjoying what I’m coming up with, consider subscribing to my Patreon. I’d love to be able to do this full-time and ramp it up to ever-greater levels, and while I CAN do it without your support, I’d love to bring you along for the journey.
Booyah, baby.
Booyah.
