Reading the thread about water ice on Mars actually makes me miss playing BattleTech. At a game convention once I hosted a game in which a battle takes place in Noctis Labyrinthus on Mars. It was a mash-up of B-Tech and War of the Worlds; ancient Martians dwelling underground had tried to invade Earth with three-legged Tripod "battlemechs", and now ComStar was on the offensive, duking it out with the Martians in amongst rock formations on the surface of Mars. Had to build cool scenery for the table for that one, and used low-gravity rules. The Martian "Mechs" required a custom sheet and damage table, and made up new (for BTech) weapons: the Martian rocket pods and of course, the mighty Heat Ray!
Our first scenario convention had the following evil combination for playing the first stage of the scenario on the surface of a large asteroid mine:
- parallel secret movement
- low gravity
- vacuum
We allowed quite large units, around batallion size. After this first stage, only a few lances had been left. Most died by friendly collisions causing depressurizations because players of the team did not talk with each other and simply optimized their movement egoistically. Was important for teaching, but also very frustrating for the teams.
In the end the winning team won the scenario by a single Phoenixhawk without legs. While all other teams fought a major melee on one of the lower levels of the mine, they managed to drop the Phoenixhawk on a huge minecart and let it travel completely ignored through the mine.
Was a very important convention for us the PhoenixCon I in 2000... we learned a lot about designing scenarios and eventually reduced the scenario to a short event on the saturday for the interested players and offered more variety on our convention.
If you are around in Germany and want get some battletech (or good meals), the PhoenixCon XVII is scheduled for the 26th October (A thursday) to the 29th. We host the German Battletech Championship again.
http://con.phoenixguard.de/