NPC Art

One of the advantages of the enormous library of material in the BattleTech cannon is the rather large collection of art assets that comes with it.  This upside has become even better since the advent of widely-distributed PDF copies of sourcebooks, making it very easy to extract and re-use character pictures from even older sourcebooks.  Even some of the action shots, properly cropped, can provide an excellent dossier image for any old NPC you might want.

Obviously the books with explicit personnel entries (Dossiers, unit books, historicals, and the like) are excellent, but there are a number of other pictures I've found throughout my searches that might be helpful when you need a pretty (or pretty ugly) face.

Men
Page 76 of Book 35303 - Jihad Conspiracies  This picture is a two-fer; a very generic-looking flag officer, and a shadowy assassin whose face and body are almost entirely concealed.

Page 81of Book 35303 - Jihad Conspiracies  This again has a set of anonymous characters (although you can puzzle out who might be in the group from the text), and provides some good head shots if carefully cropped.

Page 87 of Book 35303 - Jihad Conspiracies  A scout on this page provides and excellent full-body picture that is easily removable if you need it.


Page 103 of Book 35303 - Jihad Conspiracies  The scruffy man on the right of this frame looks out of place in the original work, but removed looks like a classic profile picture.

Page 99 of Book 35204 - Handbook House Liao This page has a picture of an officer receiving a decoration. An excellent stand-in for an officer who is up-and-coming.

Page 113 of Book 35204 - Handbook House Liao Several different classes of civilian ready for use.

Women
Page 154 of Book 35204 - Handbook House Liao Good headshot available from the image on this page.


Page 63 of Book 35024 - Handbook House Davion Waist-up shot available on this page.

Page 159 of Book 35019 - Handbook House Marik Aerospace pilot.

Page 15 of Book 1715 - MechWarrior Third Edition Headshot of technician.

Page 53 of Book 1715 - MechWarrior Third Edition Waist-up shot of woman with sword.

Page 192 of Book 1715 - MechWarrior Third Edition Waist-up shot of female covert operative.

Those are just a few examples, but a few general trends to note:

I've ignored named characters here.  If you use a character with a name, one of your characters might recognize the picture and presume that that NPC is actually the canon character in disguise.  You'll never hear the end of the conspiracy theories.

Among anonymous characters, men are wildly more common than women in the books, and this difference gets magnified in more recent works -- the artists aren't drawing anonymous female characters, they're kicking out huge numbers of anonymous male characters, so be prepared to do considerably more digging through books for female art assets.

I am.  I need a picture for Dr. Jefferies.