Jack of Harts

Those of you who know me know that I am stubborn. I am opinionated. I have a very straight definition of good and bad. And when people tell me that I’m wrong when I know I’m right, I have a tendency to say “no, you’re wrong,” and then quote chapter and verse to prove it. And I’m not always tactful when sufficiently annoyed. That has earned me friends in good measure. It has also earned me enemies.

Some of those enemies lie about me. Some twist the truth about me. Some got me removed from my position as a Catalyst Agent.

I largely withdrew from BattleTech after that. I’d been writing and publishing my own Jack of Harts stories for years at that time, and I just dove further down into that. I’m still there, and still writing, and enjoying it. And I would not be playing BattleTech right now at all if one of my best friends had not pulled me back in.

He has spent years dragging me into games at conventions or in his house or anywhere he can. He asks me for my ideas about game rules and anything to do with BattleTech from the meta to the deepest of in character story elements. It was my greatest pleasure, at one of these conventions, to drag him over to an author I knew and introduce them. Because I knew he loved the man’s work. This Saturday, that author called my friend to wish him a happy birthday.

My friend kept me involved in a game that I would have walked away from entirely if left to my own stubborn pride. He is the primary reason I still have any involvement with BattleTech. He is the primary reason I recently began painting miniatures again for the first time in years. And he is the primary reason I recently put a couple hundred bucks into the BattleTech kickstarter.

This last weekend, while enjoying a time of playing BattleTech with friends and soon-to-be friends, I had fun. It wasn’t the first time I had fun doing so, you understand. But it is the first time I did so with people I did not know without wondering which one of those people was ready to stab me in the back at the first opportunity. We were all there to have fun and play some games. So we all had fun, and someone new to the game won it all.

And we all agreed about something. That BattleTech felt good good right now. It felt promising. It felt like it did two decades ago. Like there was a future that would be fun to be part of.

I’ve spent most of my life reading and studying and playing BattleTech. I will never be the fan I once was. The time when I would spend hours and days engrossed in every sourcebook, with a spreadsheet open so I could log the slightest minutia is long gone. That passion for what is undeniably one of the largest invented universes ever put to print was burned out of me by the actions of others. But I can enjoy it again. I can spend time with friends and play it again and can look forward to painting miniatures and putting them on the table again.

And that is why I put some more money into the Kickstarter for wave 2 today. The minis really are good. I want the ones that weren’t ready for wave 1. And, yes. I would even like to have a piece of art made for me in the style of the universe. My friend got that, and it is amazing. So I sprang for a canon character while I was at it. It really is a one-time-opportunity that may never be repeated.

So I’m going to get a piece of fantastic art that my friends and enemies will generally recognize as me if what my friend got is any indication.

That’ll be cool. And that’s enough for me. I like cool.