IlClan Review

 Hey Game Fam, everything old is new again, and that feels like a very appropriate attitude for this article. Today I’m going to talk about the IlClan book for Catalyst Game Labs’s Battletech. I have a long history and love for Battletech, and I did back the Kickstarter for their Clan Invasion Boxed set. I have reviewed the first wave of those over on my YouTube, and I will review the second Wave stuff in the coming months. That, however, is not today’s key event. Today we’re going to talk about IlClan and what it means for Battletech and the game’s next steps.  

IlClan is 176 pages long. It represents the summation of a lingering Battletech plot Point that’s over twenty years old now and crosses three different game companies. That alone is fascinating, but again, not the point. This book picks up immediately where Shattered Fortress leaves off and details the Campaign fought by Clans Wolf and Jade Falcon to conquer the world from the defending forces of the Republic of the Sphere. It is written as a military history tome, which is an immensely rewarding treat for me as a fan. I have read sourcebooks from different eras and they don’t resonate the same way.

They divide the book slightly curiously. It opens up with a piece of fiction as virtually every battletech book in the last ten years has. It’s a short piece about the Jade Falcon assault on Mars, which is a fun story. After that, there’s a little blurb about how to use this book, which is worth taking the time to read. Then we dive into the heart of what’s going on.  

The book does a fantastic job of introducing you to the specific characters involved in moving the story to this point, (and it gives a character profile of someone I’d never heard of). How we got here is a fine way of crystalizing the narrative and setting this book up for a new reader to the setting. It will not give you everything you need to know, but this book is the culmination of an era for battletech that encompasses dozens of novellas and works of fiction and multiple sourcebooks. It has a lot of ground to cover before it gets where it’s going.

This battle plays out in four phases. The first three phases detail the military moves between the combatants and their battlegrounds. The back and forth between the Clan Toumans and the Republic defenders plays out through the pages, and it’s a very dynamic battle where everything’s in motion. Things come to tipping points and eventually the Republic leadership surrenders (Minor spoiler, but the tagline of the book is “Come see which Clan takes Terra” so…).  

The ultimate phase of the battle is fought between the Wolves and the Jade Falcons in Canada. It’s probably the most brutal fighting in the battletech fighting in this century, with combat losses on both sides dwarfing the battle at Tukayyid nearly a hundred years earlier. It runs pretty close to the casualty reports during the Word of Blake era, but they contained the fighting to a small stretch of ground in Canada rather than spread across the galaxy. I won’t tell you who won (because that would be awful).  

In the Trial of the IlClan's Aftermath (Phase 4’s official title), the victorious clan makes provisions for the futures, settles old accounts, and starts new feuds. Further, the book also gives us a snapshot of what else is going on in the Inner Sphere. The book closes with profiles of new units (and record sheets for them) and the Touchpoint tracks to play specific battles from the campaign.

What this book is:

This book is an excellent conclusion to the Dark Age Era. It also serves up new beginnings and new plots for the IlClan Era. It’s a bookend and hopefully closes one set of doors on stories that have been a part of the larger Battletech Universe for the last ten years. New doors open and new life breathes into the universe. For the first time in a long time, I can say that I’m not sure what’s going on with Battletech, and that is a wonderful thing. I don’t know where we’re going, and things I had thought confined to the history of the Battletech Universe are alive and well. Everything old is new again.

What this book is not:

It’s not perfect, but no book is. From a gameplay standpoint, the Touchpoint tracks are missing context to explain how they work for new players. The book is also missing Random Assignment Tables (RATs) for the three factions involved in the fighting. They also wrote this as nonfiction. If you’re looking for a more narrative expression of this event, you can read the companion novel Hour of the Wolf, by Blaine Lee Pardoe.

Overall rating: 4 Stars (out of 5)  

You can find this book at your FLGS (hopefully. If not, ask them about ordering you a copy). If you don’t have an FLGS, it’s also available at the Catalyst Game Labs Store here. You can get a pdf copy for 19.99 or the book and pdf copy for 49.99. I hope this review is helpful for you all, and if you’re interested in learning more about Battletech, someone can probably persuade me to write more articles about this game. Let me know Friends.