Pyramid Pick
Classic Battletech: War of 3039
Published by FanPro LLC
Written by Chris Hartford & Christoffer Trossen
Illustrated by Klaus Scherwinski, Jason Vargas, Kevin McCann, Chris Lewis, & Matt Plog
Maps by Oystein Tvedten
168-page b&w softcover; $29.99
War of 3039 has been a long-awaited product in theClassic Battletech universe; now that it's here, I can honestly say it was worth the wait. As aClassic Battletech player of many years, I can honestly say that this was a gap that needed to be filled in the history of the game. Sadly, this fairly pivotal event was relegated to a single chapter in the 20 Year Update and a few chapters in the novelHeir of the Dragon. All in all -- 3039, like many of the Battletech conflicts in the timeline 3030-3050 -- were relegated to obscurity, but with 3039, and the promised books in the Historicals series to come after it, that is no more.
What made this project so daunting was the fact that the work that needed to be done to pull this book together was culled from a variety of sources, and with a lot of Battletech canon, at times, the information was quite contradictory. The Fanpro creators, however, rose to the task.
So, what's in the book? One finds a format similar to the Fedcom Civil War book, in that each wave is broken down into chapters and each planet gets at least a couple of paragraphs to describe the course of the fighting on world. It also describes the "shadow war" and the reactions of the other powers in the Battletech universe. Sidebars . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: July 29, 2005
Copyright © 2005 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.