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The Clans: Warriors of Kerensky
On the other side of the spectrum from Maximum Tech is The Clans: Warriors of Kerensky, which has enough flavor text to choke a camel. This, too, is intended to add detail and a touch of realism to your Battletech games, but The Clans focuses less on the rules aspect and more on the background aspect, providing a rich and definitive look at the Clans, their history, their society, and their customs. The Good Stuff The Clans is fun to read. That's the first thing I have to say about it. Even if you don't play Battletech - even if you don't roleplay at all, and are just a science fiction fan - The Clans is a good book to pick up. The entire book contains no more than three pages of rules, leaving 125 for history, customs, and society. It fills them well, too. Chris Hartford spends 25 of those pages telling us just how the Clans got to be where they are in the current era; then, he gives us another 35 telling us about society and government. The remaining pages go into detail about the individual Clans - politics, distinctiveness, and origins - and the systems which the Clans control. Only the last three pages before the index contain rules - and those rules mainly cover honor systems within the Clans. The Bad Stuff On the other hand, The Clans is a highly specific piece of work; you're not going to learn much about the Inner Circle by picking it up, and if you're looking for new rules for your game you'll be quite disappointed. Also, it is the kind of book that you'll want to read again and again to make sure you got everything; it's comprehensive, but some of the information is fairly buried in anecdotes.