Author Archives: Andy

Stephen King Short Story Project, #2: “Jerusalem’s Lot”

A typical H.P. Lovecraft horror.

Story: “Jerusalem’s Lot,” collected in Night Shift. Published in 1978. Wikipedia entry here. Read my introduction to this blog series.

Spoiler-filled synposis: A 19th-century gentleman inherits a family estate near the shunned and abandoned town of Jerusalem’s Lot. After a series of escalating supernatural encounters, he learns that he is the last living member of a bloodline damned long ago by its association with a Lovecraftian horror. He spirals into madness and (it’s implied) kills himself to end the family curse.

My thoughts: “Jerusalem’s Lot” is a rare curiousity in the King library: a straight-up pastiche of H.P. Lovecraft. The writing style mirrors Lovecraft’s reasonably closely, and the story itself is an amalgam of several classic Lovecraft tales, most notably “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Rats in the Walls”. It incorporates almost all of the Lovecraft elements: tainted ancestry, rural New England, blasphemous tomes, inexorable descents into madness, mind-shattering revelations about the nature of reality, and (of course) cosmic horrors with unpronounceable names.

And “Jerusalem’s Lot” is a pretty decent homage—not on par with Lovecraft’s best work (since it’s basically just copying those stories), but better than Lovecraft’s weaker efforts. It has two major weaknesses: 1) it falls short of Lovecraft’s feverishly overblown vocabulary of horror; and 2) it is content to recycle Lovecraftian plots and story elements without adding anything new. Readers who aren’t familiar with Lovecraft (as I was not when I first read it) might find “Jerusalem’s Lot” unsettling and compelling. Readers who know their Lovecraft will find this story enjoyable, but in a quaint sort of way.

It’s interesting to me that outside of this story and perhaps one other (“Crouch End,” which we may get to later), King steers clear of overtly Lovecraftian tales. That is not to say that Lovecraftian elements do not crop up; Lovecraft’s influence on modern horror is immense, and King clearly appreciates that. Many of King’s tales contain villains that could be described as somewhat Lovecraftian. But King has never seemed especially interested in the baroque occult trappings of the Lovecraft mythos.

Why is that? I suspect that King simply likes evil that is personal rather than cosmic. Lovecraft’s evil gods are profoundly inhuman and impersonal; they’re malevolent forces of nature, not enemies you can love to hate. King’s bad guys, by contrast, are often quirky and “human” to the extreme. King prefers his villains cruel, petty, and believable. When Lovecraftian threats are present, as in “The Mist,” King usually provides a more recognizably human villain to serve as the story’s primary obstacle. Even King’s most seemingly Lovecraftian villain, the ancient, near-omnipotent “Pennywise” from It, spends most of its time mocking the insecurities of a band of awkward teenage nerds. What evokes a greater emotional response in you: the idea of a distant, uncaring alien demon (and the nihilistic atheism it implies), or the brutal schoolyard bully who makes your everyday life a living hell? King thinks it’s the latter. He likes villains with personalities, and personalities are not much on display in Lovecraft’s nameless gods, insane cultists, and alien monsters.

Which makes this story all the more fun for being (nearly) unique in the King library. Through either deliberate care or simple inexperience (according to Wikipedia, King wrote “Jerusalem’s Lot” in college), King paints very meticulously within Lovecraft’s lines, with few diversions into recognizeably “Stephen King” territory. Which makes for an enteratining story, but perhaps not what you were hoping for when you picked up Night Shift looking to read, you know, a Stephen King story.

One final note: although King’s novel ‘Salem’s Lot shares a setting with “Jerusalem’s Lot,” there’s no explicit connection between the short story and the novel beyond the location. In “Jerusalem’s Lot,” the evil is a degenerate cult and its monstrous deity; in ‘Salem’s Lot the problem is vampires. I like that King doesn’t feel the need to tie these more closely together. Jerusalem’s Lot is a clear example of one of his favorite themes: the “bad place,” a geographic location that attracts darkness and evil for no clear reason. The narrator of “Jerusalem’s Lot” describes this King trope well:

I believe… that there are spiritually noxious places, where the milk of the cosmos has become sour and rancid.

Next up: “Fair Extension,” from Full Dark, No Stars.

Stephen King Short Story Project, #1: “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band”

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Admit it. This is a little scary.

Story: “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band,” collected in Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Written in 1992. Wikipedia entry here. Read my introduction to this blog series.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: Two hapless travelers get lost in the woods and come across a creepy 1950s-styled small town, where the ghosts of dead rock ‘n’ roll musicians endlessly relive their glory days… much to the dismay of innocent passersby who are forced to listen to them. Forever.

My thoughts: Stephen King loves his rock ‘n’ roll. Read more than 100 pages of King’s writing and you’re certain to run into a tribute to the music of his youth—as the introductory quote to a novel, in the form of lyrics stuck in a protagonist’s head, or playing in the background of a memorable scene. Classic rock clearly means a lot to King, and in “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band,” where King imagines a magical reunion of rock legends as a nightmare, you know he’s having fun with his own obsessions.

Music is a theme in this story from the start; although protagonist Mary and her husband Clark don’t encounter the Rock ‘n’ Roll Reunion from Hell until midway through the story, King repeatedly calls attention to the music they’re listening to (Lou Reed) as they get more and more lost in the Oregon wilderness.

And they do spend quite a while getting lost. Other writers might breeze through this obligatory set-up sequence, but King takes his time, and it works to the story’s benefit. We spend this time getting to know Clark and Mary through their banter and increasing irritation with each other. There are certain types of character interactions that King depicts very convincingly, and this is one of them: spouses who sincerely love each other but who are long past the honeymoon stage of marriage and have since discovered their partner’s quirks to be both endearing and maddening (sometimes both simultaneously), depending on the context. I’m sure King’s long, successful marriage to his wife Tabitha is a large part of what makes these depictions believable and even charming. After just 10 pages of this, I find myself liking Clark and Mary quite a bit.

allmanbrothers2 But moving along: after wandering lost a while (this story takes place before cellphones and GPS devices were commonplace or even imaginable), the two stumble across a picturesque, nostalgic little all-American town with the cutesy name of “Rock and Roll Heaven,” planted inexplicably in the middle of a huge creepy forest wilderness. King often allows his protagonists a certain meta-awareness of their horror-story plights; Mary immediately recognizes that the too-perfect town is creepy as heck, and even mentions its evocation of Twilight Zone episodes and Ray Bradbury stories.

Digging up the horror lurking behind friendly facades is another classic King trope, and it’s not long at all before Mary and Clark come face to face with the true masters of this too-good-to-be-true Norman Rockwell village: zombie rock musicians. Janis Joplin, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Jimi Hendrix, and of course Elvis are not exactly alive, but they are well here. The story ends on a rather delightfully chilling note, as Mary and Clark find themselves trapped—a literal captive audience for a rock concert that, it is suggested, may just go on forever.

The idea of an afterlife reunion of tragically deceased rock stars has the potential to be sweetly melancholic rather than horrifying. King addresses this by adding a characteristically gruesome touch: the dead rock stars aren’t mournful ghosts, but disgusting, decaying zombie corpses obsessed with reliving their glory days. (If King had written this story a few years later, he might have made Gen-Xers squirm by adding Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley to the roster.) It works, and produces some memorable imagery: the mental picture of a jukebox filled with blood and gore has stuck with me over the nearly 20 years since I first read this story, and it’s still as disgusting as ever.

Speaking of characteristic King themes, we get a thumbnail version of King’s Job-like take on the theological Problem of Evil, developed more heavily in other King books but not elaborated upon here:

This had not happened because they were evil people; it had not happened because the old gods were punishing them; it had happened because they had gotten lost in the woods, that was all, and getting lost in the woods was a thing that could happen to anybody.

All in all, this is a great story, mixing familiar horror tropes (lost in the woods! small town with a dark secret!), better-than-average characters and dialogue, and a comically sick premise. King’s sense of humor runs through it as well, and I suspect he was grinning as he typed this one up. (At one point, deceased rockers Ronnie Van Zant and Duane Allman look to Mary like “the sort of fellows who dropped out of high school the third time through the tenth grade in order to spend more time meditating on the joys of drive-train linkages and date-rape.”) Highly recommended, and a good start to my October Stephen King reading.

Next up: “Jerusalem’s Lot,” from Night Shift.

The Devil’s Voice is Sweet to Hear: My October Stephen King Short Story Project

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nightshift Every year when Halloween looms on the horizon, I find myself in the mood for scary stuff. In past Octobers, I’ve made a point of watching horror movies, playing horror-themed boardgames, or reading spooky books.

This year, I find myself in a nostalgic mood, so I’m going to spend some of my October reading and reflecting on short stories by Stephen King. I spent a lot of time in college reading King, and although I loved many of his novels, I have always felt that his short stories represent his most interesting and entertaining work. I would go so far as to say that King’s short stories are some of the most memorable tales I read in all of my youth. I’ll be putting those fond memories to the test as I make my way through some of his stories, chosen semi-randomly and in no particular order (but with a bias toward his 1990s-and-earlier stories).

I’m no Stephen King expert, and I claim no special insight or exhaustive knowledge of his writings. I’m just a guy reading some stories and talking about them.

I’ll try to give you some advance notice of the story I’m reading next just in case you want to read it with me. If there are tattered copies of Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, or other King short story collections gathering dust on your bookshelf, dig ’em out and let’s pay them a visit!

First up (tomorrow) is “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band,” from the 1993 short story collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Read it with me!

Update: Here’s a list of what I’ve covered so far:

[Image from this nice blog post about King’s short story collection Night Shift.]

Materiam superabat opus

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This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and solve satisfactorily the problem which no conjecture had deciphered: the formless and chaotic nature of almost all the books. — Borges

Of the contributions made by the 2214 Nakamura-Kreitz expedition to the fields of manuscript archaeology and literary criticism, one find towers in significance above all others, and continues to cast a long shadow over the halls of academia. Much ink (along with, as survivors of the assorted semiotics conflicts of the latter 23rd century will grimly attest, actual blood) has been spilled in debating the meaning of its eight rhymed couplets.

I will not presume to add to the ongoing scholarly discussion, but with this humble essay hope to introduce a new generation of readers to one of the most puzzling manuscripts to survive the Neopacification War. The manuscript (see photograph below) was discovered in a plastic container that had been repurposed by a geneslicer mutant band to serve as part of a bunker wall. (Also in the container were five small robots of indeterminate/hybrid form; see Mullen’s Formless Masters: Optimus Prime and the Cult of Shape for a plausible, if somewhat overstated, hypothesis as to their significance).

Without further ado, the manuscript; followed by a brief set of notes on each line:

computerconfusionsmaller

Computer Confusion by Andy Rau

Let us set aside the decades-long debate about the poem’s title and purported author’s identity and simply point out that the “confusion” cited here is not to be attributed to the computers in question (a Commodore 64 and a Mac Classic, if the rest of the poem can be trusted); but to the author and/or reader.

Folks as queer as they can be;

Steering clear of distasteful and salacious theories, I assert that everything we know about the author’s emotional maturity and understanding of gender relations at the time this poem was written suggests that this line was not intended as a sexual slur.

always saying unto me:

The unusual choice of phrasing here makes sense when one considers that Rau’s literary input at this stage of his life consisted almost entirely of The Lord of the Rings knockoffs and the Heidelberg Catechism.

“Let’s play this! Let’s load up that!”

The author here expresses frustration at the continual demands of his companions to “load up” games on his parent’s computers. While this may seem the very definition of privileged, narcissistic whining, consider that “loading up” a game from a floppy disk could take up to several minutes of the author’s precious time. (“And God help those who were ‘loading up’ from a tape drive,” Nieuwenhuizen observes in They Stayed Up Late: Concessions to Chronicity in the Lives of ‘Airborne Ranger’ Players.) See line 12ff below for a better understanding of the sacrifice Rau was being asked to make.

I wanna [sic] play Dark Castle!” Drat!

Crucially, this line provides us with a terminus post quem for “Computer Confusion”: AD 1986, the year that Dark Castle was released for the Macintosh. In 1986, Rau would have been at least eleven years of age; one shudders at the implications for his emotional maturity and social relationships were “Computer Confusion” composed much later than this date.

On the challenging presence of “Drat!” here, I cannot add to Pierce-Weyland’s groundbreaking 2314 analysis.

Whatever game I want to play,
it’s “Load this game up right away!”

Rau’s companions again pressure him to “load up” games he does not wish to play.

If I wanna [sic] play Spy vs. Spy,
they want to play Up and Down. Oh My!

Clear references to the Commodore 64 games Spy vs. Spy (1984) and Up’n Down (1983). Why Rau attempted to correct the grammar of the title Up’n Down is a mystery in light of his repeated use of the word “wanna” above.

First it’s Zork and Zorro — Oooooooo!

McCulray (2245, pp. 31-33) was the first to suggest that the frankly embarrassing Oooooooo! here is a clear sign of satirical intent; but as Franz (2247, p. 75) counters, that contrasts with the painful earnestness of the rest of the poem.

Then it’s Zaxxon, Sea Wolf too!

The selfish demands of Rau’s peers, unreasonable from the start, have at this point become unconscionable.

I don’t want to use the computer with you;
there are other things I’d rather do!

The tone of the poem sharpens uncomfortably here; Rau has been pushed to such emotional distress that he lashes out at his companions—and perhaps at the reader as well. Do we not, reading this poem hundreds of years after Rau’s “death” and assumption into the Callisto Singularity, continue to harass his memory by revisiting these baleful demands?

Sullivan (2286) asserts that in this line we see clear evidence for the Satire Theory; there is no historical evidence, he claims, that there were ever any “other things” that a youthful Rau would have prioritized over the playing of computer games. I leave it to the reader to weigh the argument.

Like make a model, take a hike,
bug my sister, ride a bike.

Although Rau reportedly took part in all of these activities, only the act of antagonizing his sibling is believed to have been preferred to playing computer games. In fact, there is some evidence that Rau was occasionally deprived of computer use privileges in parental retaliation for his constant and only occasionally provoked harassment of his sister. (Cheng’s [2293] claim that Rau’s sister “totally deserved it because she was being such a pain” is sycophantic.)

So don’t tell me what we should play;
I’ll tell you — and right away!

This bitter, challenging closing couplet has bedeviled scholars for centuries. What does Rau truly want to play? Just Spy vs. Spy? When, if ever, will he tell us? Who among us—even those who don’t subscribe to the frankly religious belief that Rau will one day return (“right away”) to name his choice of games—has not been kept awake at night by fearful mental wrestlings with the savage rejection and unfulfilled promise contained in these two lines?

Falling back into The Black Hole

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cygnus I just watched The Black Hole with Michele. I haven’t watched it in probably twenty years, but it’s always held an extremely powerful nostalgic pull on my imagination. When I was a kid, I went through a period of obsession with this film—we’re talking a Black Hole lunchbox, a Maximillian model, a Black Hole storybook/record… the works.

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to revisit this as an adult. It’s widely regarded as a mediocre film, and perhaps my subconscious has been trying to spare me the tragedy of seeing a piece of nostalgia exposed as just another overwrought B-movie.

But having re-watched it at last, I’m happy to say that, to my surprise and relief, I very much enjoyed it. For all its shortcomings, it works—the whole turns out to be much more than the sum of its parts.

While it’s fresh on my mind, here are a few of the elements that make The Black Hole shine, despite the failings that critics have, with just cause, pointed out.

1. The ships and effects. Put simply, the spaceships, set design, and overall visual atmosphere are superb. The Palomino nails the Millenium Falcon aesthetic: a bit ugly and looking like it’s been around the block a few times, yet rugged and appealing. But of course the Cygnus, palace of the mad space scientist Dr. Reinhardt, is the star of the show; it’s one of the most unique and impressive-looking spaceship designs I’ve ever seen. Its strange latticework structure; its cathedral-like spires; the cavernous inside spaces that make life seem so tiny and out of place inside it. Other films have used spaceship design to suggest a cathedral-in-space (Event Horizon‘s Core, the recent Battlestar Galactica‘s Resurrection Ship; the Auriga of Alien: Resurrection), but none match the Cygnus, a drifting temple to its captain’s hubris.

The Black Hole will also make you pine for the days before real, actual, physical models were replaced by the CGI apocalypse. There’s a visceral, tactile appeal to the models here that more than compensates for the now-dated special effects.

2. Dr. Reinhardt is a wonderful villain. He’s a great mad scientist in the classic vein. Those fools told him that what he was doing was impossible, even insane! But he’ll show them. It’s probably a serious misstep that The Black Hole makes Reinhardt’s Ahab-style madness apparent from his very first appearance; it dulls the impact of our eventual discovery that he’s a totally crazy murdering megalomaniac. But hey, we knew that anyway, and it gives Maximilian Schell lots of opportunities to ham it up.

3. It’s weird and dark, with lots of unnerving details. The “robot” unmasking scene scarred me for life as a child, and it retains some of its shock value today even though it’s obviously a guy in makeup. The “robot” funeral leaves you wondering uncomfortably how much humanity might still lie buried away, despite one character’s insistence that the mental damage is irreversible. At one point, after the deeply creepy Maximillian has murdered Kate’s crewmate, Reinhardt leans close to her and begs her to protect him from Maximillian. Is he mocking her? Is he living in constant terror of Maximillian, who might really be running this horror show? Wonderfully, the movie never tells us.

And then there’s this surreal closing scene, which is a perfect metaphor for Reinhardt’s ghoulish kingdom and an evocative, unsettling picture of a personal, self-created hell:

OK, so I’m in love with this film. But it’s certainly not perfect. What keeps it from greatness?

Professional critics have more than weighed in on it’s shortcomings already; I won’t dispute those critiques, but I can’t say that the commonly-cited problems (weak script, uneven acting, a continual contrast between the film’s exciting imagery and plodding dialogue) bothered me as much as they should’ve. I will point out a few things that kept me from wholly buying into The Black Hole despite my enjoyment of it:

1. The actions scenes are weak. It feels wrong to knock a movie for having insufficiently awesome action scenes, but the action scenes in this movie are universally unconvincing and unexciting. The evil sentry robots, described as an “elite” force at one point by Reinhardt, have worse aim than Stormtroopers—look, I know they’re not really supposed to hit anything or anybody important, but they have to look like they’re trying. There’s one large gun battle in particular that is so ineptly staged that it really damages the sense of immersion.

2. Reinhardt’s secret is too obvious and revealed too early. Look, we know Reinhardt’s an insane mad scientist, but the “big reveal”—what really happened to the crew—is telegraphed continually throughout the movie’s entire second act. When we finally get our confirmation, it’s lost most of its effectiveness.

3. The science is distractingly bad. For the first few minutes, it seems like The Black Hole is going to at least pay decent lip service to Real Science—enough to let us suspend our disbelief about all this black hole business. Nobody’s asking for Stephen Hawking levels of scientific integrity here. But the movie’s final act, which takes place while the Cygnus is being pulled inexorably into the black hole, throws all believability out the window. Characters breathe in open space. They outrun meteors. It’s really distracting.

Despite its flaws, this is a worthwhile film. I’m glad I finally mustered the courage to revisit this piece of childhood nostalgia, and I’m quite confident I’ll return to it again.

Anyone who can be trusted in little matters can also be trusted in important matters. But anyone who is dishonest in little matters will be dishonest in important matters.

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This cautionary video clip, brought to you in 1993 by The 700 Club, has been making the rounds:

(More info here.)

Mocking Pat Robertson, and more specifically the anti-D&D hysteria of the 80s and early 90s, is a bit too easy at this point, so I won’t bother. But I do want to point out a few things about this video, which aims to scare people away from Dungeons and Dragons by suggesting that playing the game leads to child sacrifice and the wearing of terrible homemade wizard/KKK robes.

The most obvious thing is that nothing at all in this video remotely resembles anything that ever would be said, seen, done, or heard at a Dungeons and Dragons game. The “game” that they’re playing, which looks like a homebrew Candyland variant, bears no resemblance to D&D.

No big surprise there; few anti-D&D attacks like this showed signs that their creators had ever seen or read D&D, or talked to people who did. But look at the date this video was released: 1993, almost twenty years after D&D was first created! It’s even ten years later than Jack Chick’s infamous Dark Dungeons tract. In those two decades, nobody at The 700 Club had so much as flipped through a D&D rulebook at Toys ‘R’ Us. That graduates it well into “willful ignorance” territory.

And for somebody trying to warn of the dangers of pop culture trends, Pat Robertson has completely missed the boat here; by 1993 D&D’s heyday of popularity was well behind it. A little card game called Magic: the Gathering was just about to explode onto the scene, and as far as evil roleplaying games went, Vampire: The Masquerade and its sister games had decisively eclipsed D&D as the Shock Your Parents™ games of choice. In 1993, D&D was quaint.

Consider what this video says about Robertson’s intended audience. Anybody who had actually played D&D would immediately dismiss it as being insulting, slanderous, and irrelevent; so it clearly wasn’t bothering to address people actually playing the game. This video is talking only to people who had no clue what D&D was about, and who could be relied upon to never try to find out. Despite either laughable ignorance or simple contempt for truth, Robertson was asking people to respect his judgment about a topic they knew little about.

Ah, well. If you want to know what really goes on in the dark basements of D&D players, this remains the best source.

(Bible quote is from the Contemporary English Version.)

In D&D, the crew always goes down with the ship

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On a whim, I dug out my old AD&D Spelljammer books this afternoon. Spelljammer is the woefully under-appreciated space fantasy setting for 2nd edition Dungeons and Dragons; instead of crawling through dungeons looking for goblins to murder, you captain a magic-powered sailing ship through Ptolemaic outer space looking for space goblins to murder. My high school game group really got into it; Spelljammer gave us one of our most memorable game campaigns.

While the general tone of Spelljammer is “swashbuckling adventures in space,” my gaming friends were not content to handwave away the everyday practicalities of space adventuring. When you own a magic space boat, you’ve suddenly got to worry about questions like “How little can we pay our crew without triggering a mutiny?” I found several type-written sheets going into the details:

spelljammersheet

At first I thought that the “expendables” listed here were consumable items like food and ammunition. But no, that’s the term my players used to describe the ship’s crew. Which is a pretty good summation of most of our Spelljammer adventures.

Looking through this material made me realize how much I miss Spelljammer; it took the inherently silly concept of “D&D… in spaaaaaace!” and wrapped it in just enough seriousness to make it playable, while proudly retaining its goofy side. It only appeared as an official setting during the 2nd edition era; bits and pieces of it turned up in 3rd and 4th editions, but never as a standalone campaign setting. Perhaps one day we’ll return to the stars.

I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see. And then, one day… I got in.

“Jacques de Molay, thou art avenged!”

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Earlier this week, I was decluttering the basement, a task made more challenging by the fact that my five-year-old daughter had chosen to spread Adorable Kid Art™ all over the floor. It was going just fine, and the world made perfect sense, until I came across this page, apparently torn out of the most demented children’s coloring book in the Known Universe:

aaaaahhhhh

What the… who the… where I have seen this before? Oh, right:

Masons_baphomet

The similarities are pretty clear. I don’t know who Baphomet is calling on that telephone there, but you know it’s not going to end well for the free world.

scared

So apparently my daughter is a Templar. Or maybe a Freemason. (Jack Chick has a really great¹ tract about the Freemasons and Baphomet, but I can’t bring myself to link to his website.)

Footnotes:

^[1] crazy

Why is this ‘Mech so terrible?

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Die result (1d6)	It’s terrible because of…	Example
WHY IS THIS BATTLEMECH SO TERRIBLE? (roll 1d6)
1	Ideology	The ‘Mech’s poor design is intentional, designed to encourage or discourage certain types of behavior on the battlefield. “It’s shameful the way our Mechwarriors keep their distance from the enemy, sniping at long range, when everyone knows the true spirit of bushido is manifested in face-to-face battle. Well, without any ranged weapons, this ‘Mech will force its pilots to fight with honor.”
2	This is What Was Available	The ‘Mech was cobbled together using the only resources and equipment available to its designers. Nobody’s under the illusion that it’s a good design, but it’s better than nothing. “We’ve got a warehouse full of heavy ‘Mech chasses, and a big pile of small lasers. Might as well put ’em to use… better than letting them sit around gathering dust.”
3	Lobbying	A weapons manufacturer bribed its way into a sweet contract with the government, despite the uselessness of the product. “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger—it says here we’re required by our contract to equip every ‘Mech we make with no less than five TrueAim Plus(tm) brand small lasers….”
4	Untouchable Designer	However ridiculous the end result, the ‘Mech was designed by somebody that nobody dared criticize or contradict. “Why, this ‘Mech was designed by the Crown Prince himself. Surely you’re not implying that His Imperial Majesty knows nothing of battlefield strategy and technology, are you?”
5	Production Line Screw-up	An error on the manufacturing floor resulted in a badly mis-configured ‘Mech, but by the time anybody noticed, the cost of fixing the mistake had become prohibitive. “Oh dear, we’ve just equipped 500 assault ‘Mechs with armaments meant for light ‘Mechs. But they’ve already started shipping to the frontlines….”
6	It Wasn’t Supposed to Be This Way	The ‘Mech was an experimental test platform (or maybe a practical joke by an over-tired engineer) that was never intended for mass production. But key emails were skimmed instead of carefully read, and you can guess what happened next. “Don’t worry, nobody would possibly be stupid enough to mistake this for a serious production design… right?”

FileTR3025_Front_Cover One of the most-read books in my game library when I was in junior high and high school was Technical Readout 3025, a collection of ‘Mechs that you could use in your Battletech games. They were designed using the construction rules in the rulebook, but were also the “official” ‘Mechs used by the different factions within the Battletech setting.

What surprised me at the time was that the Technical Readout contained a number of ‘Mechs that were terribly designed.

By that, I mean that there were numerous ‘Mech designs in the book that were obviously inefficient or just generally ineffective. At the time, I was spending my evenings and weekends poring over the ‘Mech construction rules figuring out how to most efficiently balance weapons, armor, and speed in ‘Mech designs. When “official” ‘Mechs appeared that were subpar, I was surprised and almost offended.

Nowadays, I realize that poorly-designed ‘Mechs are a feature of the setting, not a bug. They add verisimilitude to the Battletech universe. Just as in our modern militaries there are plenty of examples of poorly conceived, ineffective boondoggles, so the militaries of the Battletech world would have been plagued by such things. But at the time, I was mostly just annoyed that I had paid money for a book that contained ‘Mech designs no competent player would ever want to be stuck with.

It looks cool, but trust me… you don’t want to be stuck piloting one. And you know, it doesn't even look that cool.

The worst offender, by far, was the CGR-1A1 Charger, an assault-class ‘Mech (at 80 tons, one of the heaviest ‘Mechs in the setting) that had almost no effective weaponry and mediocre armor. With an armament of just five small lasers—the wimpiest, shortest-ranged weapons in the game—it was completely outclassed by ‘Mechs half its weight. It was slightly faster than other heavy ‘Mechs, but not faster than the light and medium ‘Mechs that outgunned it. Its only conceivable battlefield advantage was its weight; if it could close to melee range, it could (in theory) deliver a pretty hefty punch or kick. But trust me: while your 80-ton clunker is making its own personal Charge of the Light Brigade at an enemy unit, you can bet that it’s getting showered with missiles, lasers, and autocannon fire every step of the way. Because your enemy is not stupid enough to be piloting a Charger.

At the time, the presence of the Charger was an inexplicable annoyance. These days, it’s a charming part of the setting. And it makes for a fun excercise to imagine how such a poorly-conceived ‘Mech would make it from the planning stages to the actual battlefield. Above is a quick chart I put together to answer the question. When you’re handed a terrible ‘Mech to play with, just roll a six-sided die on the chart above to see how it came to be.

Obviously, this’d work with any military or sci-fi game, with slight tweaking. What other reasons should be added to this table?

The Staging Point

a microscopic cog in the catastrophic plan