BattleTech: California Nebula - DriveThruRPG.com

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Under License From

NEBULA

CALIFORNIA

BATTLETECHTM

Welcome to theWelcome to the

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STAR LEAGUE ERA CLAN INVASION ERA JIHAD ERA

SUCCESSION WARS ERA CIVIL WAR ERA DARK AGE ERA

creditsProject Development: Herbert A. Beas IIBattleTech Line Developer: Treyhang Liao’s Manicurist

Assistant Line Developer: Ben H. RomeWriting: Herbert A. Beas II and Paul SjardijnProduction Staff

Cover Design and Layout: David KerberCover Art: Matt Cross and David KerberGraphic Presentation: Matt Cross and David KerberRecord Sheets: Johannes Heidler, Sebastian Brocks, and David KerberCatalyst Game Labs Art Director: Brent Evans

Factchecking/Playtesting: What’s That?

Special Thanks: To Everyone who loves that we do this kind of thing every year. If it weren’t for you, well, we probably wouldn’t be doing this anymore…

Welcome to the Nebula California

Summation: Nothing of significant interest here. Returning to Base.

–Official ComStar Explorer Corps report on Stellar Object NGC 1499 (California Nebula), ca. 3056

Let me just get this out of the way: ComStar’s Explorer Corps are filthy liars. We should really stop taking their archives for granted, and do all our explorations from scratch. No hand-holding!

For example, according to their mid-3050s reports, the EC rummaged around the rimward edge of the Inner Sphere in their search for the Clans’ Homeworlds, signs of the long-lost Wolverines, and a host of other holy grails, getting as far as penetrating the Perseus-Cepherus Cloud Complex that dominates the rimward expanses. According to those reports, they went as far as NGC/SLSC 1499, a.k.a. the “California Nebula”, and described that as the farthest extent of their explorations.

“Yeah, right!” I’d say, “And I’m a covert Canopian cat-girl!”If ComStar really made it this far at all—and, yes, I do mean “if”,

because I’m honestly at the point where I’m willing to believe they called the whole thing off after passing through more than 200 light-years of nothingness—their crews probably didn’t do more than a telescopic look at the region from three jumps away and said “nothing to see here” before turning back. Either that, or those bastards fully scanned these worlds, found out what was going on here, and thought they could save it for themselves…before forgetting entirely about it!

Alright, enough on that. I’m starting to get a bit heated now…The attached file recounts the findings of the first CalNeb

Expedition, launched out of IE’s staging areas on Farhome. Many of the teams assembled for this survey were drawn equally from the various departments of the University of Past and Future, and thus enjoy the financial and administrative blessings of the Mutual Exploration Network (MEN), Millennium Foundation, and Star Group—all under the united umbrella of Interstellar Expeditions. While the expedition is nominally under my principle author, it has been agreed prior to our outset that multiple teams would be established as needed, with all such teams given free rein to explore what we thought would be a set of largely lifeless worlds that may have served as secret waypoints for the Amaris-backed operations that led to the fall of the first Star League.

What we found instead were several stars teeming with human settlements or their remains—all very much active, and unique in ways far more exceptional than any of us ever dreamed. As I do not wish to steal anyone’s thunder with this cover paper, I will allow the separate reports enclosed within to delve into the details.

Rest assured, the California Nebula is home to surprises that could revolutionize life in the Inner Sphere.

–Dr. Pankaj Rani, PhD, Senior Mission Director, IE Deep Periphery Expedition CalNeb I, 3105

EXPLORER’S REPORT: CALIFORNIA NEBULA

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Explorer’s Report: California Nebula is a special setting companion set in the far fringes of the BattleTech setting, presenting unique new worlds and environs that may be used to spice up your BattleTech campaigns, whether they are role-playing adventures using the rules found in A Time of War (AToW), or the tactical combat rules found in Total Warfare (TW) and Alpha Strike (AS).

Of course, given the fact that we are releasing this puppy on the first of April, a day we tend to reserve for mischief, it should be obvious to all that the material and rules presented in this electronic volume are provided purely in the interests of fun, and may be considered non-canon. No, really; as much as we would love to claim that what you find inside this book is really happening in the BattleTech universe, it’s really not.

[Author’s Note: Well, actually, it could all be canon; we’re not sure. It seems that something surrounds the California Nebula that allows JumpShips in, but prevents them from leaving its boundaries. These poor IE folks you’ll be hearing from? They can jump out any time they want, but they can never leave! It’s a real

wonder how their reports are even making it into your hands, in fact… Are you a spy or something?]

[Developer’s Note: The developers would like to apologize for the author’s rant above! Rest assured, that he is clearly delusional, and will be sacked. Nothing to see here! Move along!]

Anyway, canon or no, basic rules covering the use and effectiveness of the technologies, techniques, and equipment for your BattleTech games can be found at the back of this volume. As unconventional as they might be, they may be introduced to games based on the core rules found in TW, TO, AToW, and their various companions. For the benefit of players who concern themselves which such things, the data for all of the featured units and material in this book are the very definition of Experimental-level rules, regardless of their era of play.

[Writer’s Note: Even future eras?][Developer’s Note: Especially future eras! Now, go box

your stuff!]So, you know, read on and have fun!

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

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THE MONSTER OF IRON AND FIRE

With a thunderous roar, the creature—unlike any that Uraguan, son of Lord Arugula of the Riverden Barony, had ever seen—opened its dragon-like maw, revealing rows of glinting metal teeth, and spewed forth a golden fan of pure fire. Holding his mystical shield high in an effort to stave off the heat, the ranger bolted back over the wall of boulders and felled valley oak trees that had been his cover only moments before.

Yet even though his shield might have spared his flesh from the intense wash of demonic wrath, he found the lower half of his cloak had bet set alight. In a frenzy, he jammed his bastard sword into the soft green earth, reached up for his throat with his now-freed gauntlet, and yanked away the clasp that kept the garment in place. A quick toss sent the smoking ruin away, but he was already too busy retrieving his sword to care where it landed.

“What in the Nine Layers is this monstrosity?” demanded the short, hairy wall of muscle, encased in armor of chainmail and leather, who now huddled there with him. Grimely Thundershield clutched a notched, war-worn, double-edged battle axe in his meaty hands as if it were the most precious thing in his life. His eyes were wide with the closest thing to fear that Uraguan had even seen in a mountain dwarf.

He was about to tell Grimely that he had no idea what it was, when he realized that the question wasn’t aimed at him.

Largoles Woodstrider, fair of hair and boyishly slender, shrugged helplessly. His cool blue eyes betrayed far less panic than Grimely’s, but his lips were a thin line. The usual jibes and witticisms that colored most of his interactions with the dwarf had failed to emerge. The experience of countless adventures told Uraguan that this was how the elf expressed his true fear, concealing his worry behind a veil of stoic silence.

The earth shuddered as the monster stomped onward, moving off with great strides, but far from in a hurry.

Uraguan dared to twist himself around, and glanced over a low point in the smoldering rocks that even now continued to radiate the heat of the beast’s fire.

Through the haze of drifting smoke, he saw the great bulk of the monster, hunched forward and pounding the earth on four mighty legs. Its broad tail swayed easily a man’s height above the valley floor, moving back and forth almost lazily now. With the creature faced away from him as it was, Uraguan could see sunlight gleaming off of the broad, segmented metal plates that covered it from head to toes. Spikes rose about its gigantic body, forming a ridge of death around its fore-shoulders. Beneath all those plates of metal, the human ranger had glimpsed an underlying hide of the darkest black, but the constant, grinding movement of the beast’s surface plates as it moved about had denied his elfin companion an effective target for his enchanted arrows.

“Where are the others?” he asked in a low tone, satisfied that the great lumbering hulk was far enough away for the moment.

Grimely blinked and gazed back toward another of cluster of boulders—one that still managed to look like the ancient castle wall it had once been. His eyes narrowed on the area, but it was Largoles who finally spoke.

“The gnomes and Grando are back there,” he said. “I haven’t seen Beanomir since our last attack.”

A frown twisted Uraguan’s scruffy, unshaven features. For all his arrogance, Beanomir was a fine warrior, and it would be terrible to lose him so soon in this quest, especially against this metallic mountain of hate that nobody had even warned them about before they set out. Sure, the mission at hand was perilous, what with the ork-men that the Dark Lord of the Dragon Lands and the Traitor Mage Salamain kept sending their way. But the oracles and wise men who plotted their path through the Misty Valley never mentioned the possibility that an armor-clad, fire-breathing monstrosity bigger than a wizard’s keep and armed with flaming, stone-throwing horns, would appear in these pastoral lands.

And now, it looked like their fellowship was down its best fighter. Two gnome rogues, two healers, two rangers, and a dwarven berserker were no match for this gargantuan beast.

And the mage, thus far, had yet to even come up with an idea that worked against it!

Archmage Grando the Golden, his gray eyes intense and his heart racing, held open his great tome of creatures with one shaky, withered hand, while the other frantically flashed through the pages. Decades of intense research into the arcane arts, the study of the natures and the magical weaves of this world, had never prepared him for the creature that thundered across this valley with such wanton abandon.

Originally, he thought they had stumbled upon one of Salamain’s latest abominations, a flightless dragon perhaps, bereft of its wings and covered in plates of polished metals for protection against spell and sword alike. Or maybe it was a clockwork golem, he had mused, a blending of gnome and dwarf engineering given life through the means of the Dark Lord’s necromancy. Yet nothing in this venerable monster catalog fit what they saw here today.

“Grando…?” a trembling voice penetrated his frustration. The wizened, long-bearded mage looked up to find himself nose-to-snout with a rogue in studded brown-leather armor…even though he was seated, and the gnome was standing. A pang of regret that he had led these tiny folk into this dangerous crusade struck him—but the notion of entrusting of this world’s most dangerous artifact with the adventurers least likely to be taken seriously by the Dark Lord seemed like such a good idea at the time!

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THE MONSTER OF IRON AND FIRE

“Frody…?” he asked, arching an eyebrow. Panic or no, the golden-robed archmage knew better than to let his fears show. The hallmark of the mage class, after all, was to at least appear as if everything in the world was known to them, that there were no surprises, no mysteries too dark for them to enlighten. Between them and the clerical healers, they—the gifted magic users—had spent generations cultivating the trust of the mundane peoples across these misbegotten lands.

“The beast is moving off, Wise One,” Frody Braggins told him, his dark gnomish eyes darting upward as if to confirm his own assurances. In his hand, he still clutched his silver, magically-sharpened short sword, but he had yet to go anywhere near enough to the monster to use it.

“Good, good!” Gando exclaimed thoughtfully. “And how fare our taller friends?”

Sammi Grammarchek, himself looking around the side of the ruined castle wall, turned his curly-haired head back to them both. “I see Larg, Grime, and Urag over there, but Sir Beanomir is...”

Grando arched his eyebrow as Sammi’s voice trailed off and he peeked around the wall again. The second of their party’s “rouges”, Sammi prided himself on his stealth and his keen senses to scout the lands and track his prey. Now those senses were being used to find the self-styled warrior-knight who was—naturally—the first one to try and attack this beast when they encountered it.

That foolish act had brought the monster’s wrath down squarely upon all of them!

“I… I don’t see him,” Sammi finally finished.“Tragic,” Grando said, hoping that none of the others heard the

sarcasm in his tone. This was hardly the time to let his contempt for the simpleton to bleed out.

“Have you figured out what our foe is?” a third gnome joined in. Mary was one of their clerical healers, a female whose pink hair and pony tails made her look somewhat comical, but which belied the fact that she might have had the keenest mind of them all—outside of Grando’s own, of course.

“Why, I believe I have, young lady,” he said confidently, as he flipped another page in the catalog and found… “I believe we are facing a magically altered terraskasaur.”

Inwardly, Grando thanked the Fates that he had turned to a page indicating a creature so rare on this world that the descriptions of its appearance rarely went beyond “big”, “four-legged”, and “breathes fire”. It was said to be one of the largest of the saurian monsters in all of the lands, but virtually never seen or heard from far from coastal areas.

And thus, his theory leapt toward “magically altered”. The more he thought about it, the less his words sounded like

a desperate stretch of all reason. The sketchy description certainly fit what he had observed of this ironclad monster, especially

considering the powers of the Dark Lord and Traitor Mage combined. Indeed, if anyone could harness such an unholy terror and unleash it as a behemoth of metal and magic, it would be them!

It made so much sense to Grando that he decided it had to be providence that he found the answer in a flash of insight. He turned his attention back to the page, satisfied that he had it now, his mind intent on trying to find out how to kill it.

Beanomir, Hero of the Lands, and Warrior-Heir to the Throne of the Kingdom of Gordon, found himself at the base of a tree, rubbing his head, which throbbed painfully. His plate-mail armor, dented and scuffed, was otherwise intact, and he had surmised (after a brief test of his limbs and digits) that the man inside it was as well. Finally daring to stand, he looked around, brushing back a lock of his own wavy brown hair. By divine providence, he found what he was looking for quickly—the gleaming two-handed sword of his forefathers, imbued with magical might, lay only a dozen strides away.

He allowed himself a sigh of relief at that; a non-magical warrior hero without a sword was…well, a ranger, he supposed. Or maybe a rogue. He shuddered at the thought of either, as the images of Uraguan and Frody popped into his mind, unbidden.

As he stood to retrieve his fallen weapon, he sniffed the air, quickly detecting the scent of burning wood, and the strange, acrid stink of the beast. The memory of his failed attack flooded back to him. He had slid in close, quite proud of his own ability to use rogue-like stealth without all the shifty training the gnomes had. Of course, it helped that the monster itself was loud as the Nine Hells, but that would be left out of the tales he’d have after this was over.

As huge as it was, and covered as it was in such thick plates of exotic armor, he found it easy to scale the thing, climbing from its lazily swaying tail to the base of its armored spine before the rest of his companions even realized he had left their side. Grando had identified it as a dragon that the Dark Lord or his minions had ripped the wings from and strapped with the magical metal in order to create an unstoppable siege mount.

Well, a lifetime of serving his kingdom and its vassals as a warrior-heir had long since taught Beanomir how to handle any battle mount, no matter how immense:

Kill the rider, and the beast becomes harmless.Simple!That was, until Beanomir made it to the broad plates where

he figured the great beast’s shoulder blades would be, and he still could not see a rider. Indeed, all he could see were metallic spikes flaring out from its shoulder flanks, and a pair of huge, metal tubes that extended forward, beyond the thing’s draconic-like head. The tubes almost seemed like tusks to Beanomir, but he had never seen tusks extending from just inside a beast’s shoulders before.

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THE MONSTER OF IRON AND FIRE

Still, he proceeded. Maybe the rider was veiled somehow. Or maybe he had dismounted and stood someplace below the monster, just out of sight. The reins and saddle would be empty then, and perhaps the creature would easily accept a new master just as a common equine mount might.

As he carried onward, he heard a sharp hiss from off to the side, in the thick trees near the remnants of a castle so long forgotten that even Beanomir didn’t know its name any more. He glanced that way and saw the others, still cowering in the shadows. Uraguan had a wild-eyed look on his face, and was shaking his head, while the elf Largoles was trying to motion him back.

But Beanomir hadn’t come this far for nothing. He moved forward, coming to base of the monster’s neck, where he found…nothing but more armor. No saddle. No reins. And certainly no veiled rider (unless the bugger was particularly patient). Well, there was always one final option: kill the beast itself. Beanomir had slain draconic mounts before. He had even slain mastodonian siege mounts single-handed. If the others wanted to play it safe, that was all okay by him. His was a magical sword that could cleave through some of the finest armors in the land.

He raised his zweihander blade high overhead and, with a powerful downward thrust… bounced harmlessly off the beast’s armor.

The monster barely flinched.What in the Nine Hells was that?He glanced back to see the rangers were finally moving

forward, probably hoping to join the fight before all the real damage was done so they could share in Beanomir’s glory.

Well, he’d just have to hurry, then!He repositioned himself, looking for a gap in the armor

plates. In doing so, he found himself just above the back of the beast’s armored head, where he saw a leathery-looking expanse of blackness. Perfect! This would reach the brain stem for sure! He smelled a rank odor from the gap, something that reminded him of burning pitch. He idly hoped nothing foul would be exuded when he struck.

But as he once more tried to jam his powerful sword into that gap, the monster lifted its head up, partially closing the very opening Beanomir was aiming for. His blade clanged off the bronze-hued metal that protected the back of its skull.

Loudly.There was a deafening roar, and the monster lurched.It was the last thing he recalled before waking up at the base

of a valley oak, with only his sword in sight.But now he heard—and felt—the powerful thumping of the

monster’s feet. With the clarity of his situation restored, Beanomir looked down at his family’s ancestral blade.

“Time to finish this fight!” he said.

Piper Merryweather let out a gasp of alarm as Beanomir suddenly burst from the woods behind her, sword held high. Amazed that the human had managed to slip so far behind them, she took a moment to process that fact before turning to alert the others that their party’s fighter was, in fact, still among the living.

The others had regrouped by this point, moving forward from the castle ruins to the rocks where the rangers and dwarf had stood. Grando had just finished explaining that the beast they were facing was something so rare, so powerful, and clearly so well armored by the Dark Lord, that their weapons would be useless against it.

“Stab with all the steely blades you have,” he had intoned, his voice resonating with deep meaning, “but you just cannot kill this beast.

“But, there might yet be a way to defeat it without a fight,” he then added. “The terraskasaur is said to be an intelligent creature, with a gentle soul, capable even of speech. If I can reach that soul, I might be able to break the Dark Lord’s control over this one!”

They were still working out how he would do that when Piper finally found her voice, and screamed to Beanomir, who was even now racing straight toward the monster, somehow managing to miss the rest of the party’s presence less than a town’s square away!

She did catch Grando’s gaze for just a moment, while her finger pointed nervously at the raging warrior. The old human’s eyes followed her finger, and blinked slowly as they took in the sight.

“Nine Hells!” he groaned.

Seeing the pompous warrior pounding across the field, toward the armored monster’s backside, while holding his useless sword aloft and hollering like a village idiot, dashed all of Grando’s hope of coming up with a clever stratagem. The monster, quickly becoming aware of Beanomir’s incoming attack, turned itself about with massive, ponderous strides. The tube-like horns on either side of its head now tuned toward the pathetic glory hound. Horns that had unleashed a hail of flaming stones just moments after the fighter’s first attack and leveled an entire copse of trees perilously close to the rest of their band—but which the fighter never saw in action.

Grando almost hoped they would unleash their flaming hell anew and put Beanomir out of their misery, but instead he sighed. He could not allow one of the fellowship to die through his inaction, even if it was the one with, as his colleagues often put it, “the lowest intelligence score”.

He turned to the others, and directed them to the castle ruins behind them once more.

“Flee, you fools!” he commanded, as, on shaky legs, he stepped around the boulder before them, and summoned a sonorial spell.

He would need to get the monster’s attention before it unleashed its dark magic…

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