[Abe Sargent]

Begin Abe’s Light Jihad Rant


Ah yes. The Jihad.

No matter what I may feel, the Jihad is a part of the universe. I can’t just pitch it.

In fact, we know that it is. The people in charge of the universe, book authors, video games, sourcebooks, and more got together biannually and planned the major plots for the next part of the battletech universe. After they did the split between ComStar and Word of Blake, they knew there would be a battle between them later on

That was planned. What that looked like was not planed in the beginning. (According to forum posts, intros to books, etc).

They began to work, years ahead of schedule, on the beginning of what the jihad would look like, and it was large. Both ComStar and Blake were building, and ready to smash into each other across a variety of fronts. The Civil War beginning and then….it happened.

FASA shut down. The company that made this stuff was done. A few months before, the founder of FASA and co-creator of the BattleTech line, Jordan Weissman has founded WizKids Games. He goes ahead and purchases various licenses from FASA, including BattleTech. He uses this to create a spin-off of his hugely successful Mage Knight game using the same clix mechanics, called Mechwarrior: Dark Age.

In order to reboot the franchise a bit, he sets it in the 3130 era, and in a Dark Age that is subsequent to a massive Inner Sphere cleansing event called the Jihad. He created a new storyline, and that involved certain groups that survived the Jihad, included a new, never-before-heard-of-state called the Republic of the Sphere.

I can’t fault Weissman. He took an IP he helped to create, and kept it alive by marrying it to the collectible miniature market. Then another company came in and wanted to keep making BattleTech books – FanPro in Germany (BattleTech had always been hugely popular in Germany, there were German-only novels, magazines, and sourcebooks).

Less than two years after the shutdown of FASA’s Battletech line, the next books were rolling off the presses while multiple MechWarrior: DA sets had been released, and they had published a history of the Republic of the Sphere, the jihad and the Dark Age. I read it. It was crazy detailed, and seeing what happened to the universe. Nasty stuff. It didn’t feel right.

Then FanPro began working on the first Jihad sourcebook (Dawn of the Jihad). In many ways, their hands were tied. Even though the people in charge had been in charge at FASA, they felt that the highly detailed universe in 3130 required that they make changes to the Jihad story they wanted to tell. Unable to use novels, and requiring way too much fact-checking (both forward to WizKids and backward to FASA), the book took forever to finish, and was even submitted to WizKids for approval, just to make sure it didn’t conflict with any anticipated story lines they were preparing.

Without any novels, and without the ability to fully explore the story as anticipated, they instead decided to create a different way to write the sourcebook. It’s just a collection of documents, news articles, press releases, and such. They even pointed out that most people in their campaigns would deviate from the storyline anyway, so they provided a variety of detail that was, in some places, intentionally contradictory. That is what they wanted. You could take whatever facts were happening, and hang your hat on them, and flesh them out however you wanted.


In fact, they did this with a ton of sourcebooks that introduced conspiracies that would make the illuminati look like a birthday party and convoluted plotlines that would inspire a year of stories on General Hospital. And again, you don‘t have to use any of it if you don’t want to.

So, the result is a muddied set of sourcebooks, with a bunch of ideas of what might have happened, and none of it really matching the sort of things that were previously envisioned. Feh.

And thus, the Jihad has never felt right to me. There are a few reasons for this to me:

1). I still remember reading that long history to catch people up on the WizKids website, and the more I read, the more it just felt like they went, way, too far.
2). People begin to act like caricatures of themselves (especially the clans) right around this time, and do it with the Wars of Reaving in some places as well.
3). The level of devastation for the Inner Sphere discussed in general, summative terms, doesn’t match what happened in the sourcebooks.

A. Perfect example, use of biological weapons to destroy planets. Want to know how many are mentioned as destroyed by the Word of Blake in the7 sourcebooks? FIVE. That’s not that big of a deal in a universe with more than 2000 planets. Odessa, Alarion, Talon/Menke, etc. Not a lot here folks.
B. In fact, many of the diseases that broke out during the jihad were nowhere near Blake control (Galedon). Orbital Bombardment is used again as a weapon by most states, and almost all of them use it tactically (like we did) to focus fire on a certain, hugely defended position or strategic targets. Only a handful of cases (almost always done by the clans) were exceptions to this.
C. Nukes were a part of the problem right? Except, they are used, by far, in two ways – tactical nukes against defenses that requires something to unplug them and against WarShips in space, where fallout won’t be an issue. That’s it. They aren’t used on battlefields. Again, nothing we haven’t seen, done, and justified ourselves.
D. By the end of the jihad, very few worlds have reach the point of no return due to the quadfecta of WMDs: Orbital bombardment, chemical weapons, biological weapons, and nuclear weapons. Very few planets are off the map post-jihad. In fact, all of the worlds that are destroyed by Clan Raven, Blake, or Inner Sphere are…

Radstadt – Ghost Bear
Vantaa – Wolf
Alarion – Lyran Alliance
Galedon – Draconis Combine
An Ting – Draconis Combine
Galax – Federated Suns
Aea - Taurian Concordat
Circinus – Circinus Federation
Necromo – Capellan Confederation
Buenos Aires – Capellan Confederation
Lopez – Duchy of Andurien (Former Free Worlds League)
Gibson – Former Free Worlds League
Poulsbo - Former Free Worlds League
Diamantina - Former Free Worlds League
Paradise - Former Free Worlds League

And there’s your sphere-raising changes. 5 of those were by the Principality of Regulus hunting down Blake, and one by Clan Snow Raven. Aea was destroyed by pirates not related to Word of Blake. The clans themselves depopulated Vantaa in battle. So Word of Blake was responsible for Galax, Necromo, Lopez, Aires, and An Ting, and trying to destroy Odessa (cures were later found). They intentionally targeted systems that supported shipyards and could repair or build WarShips.

E. In fact, many places are never invaded by Word of Blake. Quick guess looking at the map? Around two-thirds are in areas never really under the attack of Blake. At its height, the Blake held 146 worlds. By comparison, the Federated Suns is more than 500 worlds. It’s still roughly 100 fewer than the Capellan Confederation has. Most of the battles that were fought were by pirates, clans, internal forces, or external aggression, and despite all of that, roughly half seems to be never bothered by any of that.

That’s not much of a Sphere cleansing event, now is it?

Not a fan of the jihad.