Backstories

We're starting to nail down the last bits of pre-game backstory and plot with my players, but a sudden moment of inspiration came to me to help justify one of my players' selection of 'Mech and background.

Bert's character is a 40-year-old ComGuard who fought at Tukayyid. He obviously survived the battle and went on to participate in Operation Bulldog and the drive to the Clan Homeworlds, before returning to the Inner Sphere. He then does another tour with ComStar through the FedCom Civil War, before participating in the Case White landings of 3068. Also, he drives a Black Hawk.

Huh. How to weave all this into the greater BattleTech storyline? Well, let's start with Tukayyid. Most of the ComGuard was there, but this character (as of this writing he still doesn't have a name I have been notified of) would've been about 24 at Tukayyid, only a few years out of Sandhurst. After reviewing the history of the battle in the ComStar sourcebook (FASA 1655), I thought the 283rd Division would make the most sense for him -- a largely inexperienced unit, but one that held Clan Wolf at bay by preventing an encirclement of the Tenth Army at Brzo. That seemed a good position to launch a career from.

The tricky part about the 283rd is that by 3062, ten years later, the 283rd is viewed with suspicion as a potential bastion of Blakists in ComStar (Field Manual:ComStar, p. 39), so we need to move him out of that unit. After Tukayyid, Precentor Martial Focht assembles the 472nd Division, better known as Invader Galaxy, a Clan-styled ComStar unit under Precentor Lisa Koenig-Cober, and an element of the 12th Army. I was just reminded of the 472nd while reading the new Era Report:3060 PDF that came out a few days ago. Koenig-Cober's entry in the ComStar Personas section was enough to jog my memory about the full-Clan-equipped ComStar Division. That would be an ideal unit for him to gain his Black Hawk in, and a confrontation with a superior defecting to the Word provides an opportunity for his transfer as the rest of his Level II goes over and he alone remains loyal to the ComGuard. We'll say he's with the unit when it forms in 3058. He stays with the 472nd, conducting wargames and eventually following Taskforce Serpent up the Exodus Road with the rest of the Bulldog elements.

Now I need to get him into the 394th Division sometime during the FedCom Civil War. After serving the 472nd with distinction, Bert's character found that being assigned full-time to wargames at the Focht War College was not to his taste, so he petitioned for transfer to a combat unit. At the time, the 394th was conducting operations in the Chaos March under Precentor Reine. With his transfer he was permitted to keep his 'Mech, and is still serving with the 394th as of gamestart.

With just a couple of source books, I was able to flesh out this character's backstory and provide real touch-points in the history of BattleTech, as well as leverage a number of pre-written personalities in the canon to help fill his presence in the universe. Now Bert can look up the histories of the units he was in to get a sense of his history, or I can easily digest the relevant entries to provide him with a one-page service record of his character, and provide the kind of continuity that you can only get from a universe as fully-developed and well-documented as the BattleTech universe.