User:TheVenge

About me[edit]

On a Friday night when I was a pre-teen, back in the mid-late 80s, a friend down the street called me up and said he'd bought a strategy game called "Battletech" from a local hobby store. He and I ended up devouring the game over that first weekend, and in the years to come we gobbled up the growing string of novels and source books whenever we could.

A strategy game geek even at that early age, I spread the gospel of Battletech in turn to several other friends during those years. I came to especially love the gritty, written-as-history lore that FASA's team had laid down underpinning this game, and so collected the novels, tech readouts, and source books with a certain amount of zeal. Even now I have (almost) every novel printed, many of them the originals (ahem the Unseen Wolves on the Border cover), all the original FASA TROs, and many of the source books -- the original House books being the pride of my collection. While I am sure there are collectors out there that can proverbially put me to shame, I am very proud of what I've managed to keep and preserve, and to this day I still manage to constantly be in a state of re-reading through one or two of them at a time.

However, sometime in my late teens, I lost contact with my game group and to a large extent my fandom took a detour to life: wife, kids, career, all that. Even though I briefly dabbled with a couple of the Mechwarrior titles, for me during those years Battletech collected dust on a shelf, both figuratively and literally. It was during this time that FASA closed its doors and all the related weirdness surrounded it -- e.g, Unseens, the Jihad+ eras, and the WizKids "clicky-tech".

But as it would happen, back in 2012 a friend of mine -- one of those I'd introduced the tabletop game a decade before -- re-introduced me to the game via MegaMek. He and I used MegaMek/MekHQ to run a campaign for/with a half-dozen friends (which as of this writing is still going strong), and in the telling and writing of said campaign I have firmly reignited my love of Battletech's lore and style.

I work in the IT industry, have a beautiful wife, and 3 teenage sons, one of which just moved to college.

As of August 2020, here on Sarna, I have only begun to get into editing, and though I have some knowledge and talent in this area, I feel I still have a lot to learn.

Projects[edit]

TBD