Ghost stories and monsters of the inner sphere | Battletech Lore

Generic greetings, and this time around something spooky and silly. A universe as big as BattleTech tends to have a lot of odd, funny and scary stories happening around the fringes. So today, we're going to be going over a few of the ghost mechs in the setting and talking about what they are, what they do, and how they work. So settle in to learn about a few interesting, and totally not real, monster mechs.

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0:00 Intro
1:44 Thirteen
6:42 Great Gaffas Ghost
11:38 Black Marauder

[scienceinsanity]

The awesome artist of the thumbnail and one of the coolest depictions of the black marauder ever was done by tychorianDraws. The guy makes really cool artwork revolving around mechs, surrealist imagery and horror stuff. Go check him out on X at:

[TheDeinonychus]

Mechwarrior: "That mech is haunted! Ghosts of past pilots linger in it!"
Titan Princeps: "That's a feature."

[SenorGato]

"That can only be attributed to ghost, or spirits, or something more evil."

ComStar. It's just ComStar.

[PopeMetallicus]

I think the most wholesome part of the concept behind 13, is that a LOT of mechs in the IS get passed down through families. So the idea of my Warhammer frying the cockpit of a poor unfortunate Capellan drone with generations of my family cheering me on like WWF fans makes me smile

[LRK-GT]

What's great about the 'supernatural' in BattleTech:
"There's no more Supernatural in BattleTech, than there is in reality"


Been alive long enough to agree with this, wholeheartidly.

[archerbascha]

Imagine the Black Marauder and Gaffas Ghost meeting because the later wants to protect his descended from the Black Marauder.

[raycearcher]

Salvage crew: "Oh sweet, a free Marauder!"
Black Marauder: "FEED ME A STRAY CAT"

[guitarhausdoesntknowwhatac]

The black Marauder is an absolute horror. Hands down the most terrifying thing in the whole of the lore.

[PanzerLemming]

One of my favorite ghost possessions in Battletech has got to be Terry Ford's Charger: Number Seven. Suffice it to say Terry was the luckiest mechwarrior in the Inner Sphere up until the 4th Succession War; Terry was crazy enough to try a Highlander Burial on an enemy mech, then face planted due to a bad gyro. His mech would be refitted by Sorensen's Sabers but would not work for any other pilot than Terry. Then one day, it mysteriously vanished from the dropship that it was in during a routine drop drill. Ultimately, only Terry understood how to used that old CGR-1A1 that he maintained all by himself, and Number Seven didn't want any other pilot than Terry Ford.

[Deepkeel]

I love how an advert interrupted the bag pipes LITERALLY a second after they started.

[mistformsquirrel]

The Black Marauder is what happens when a Chaos Knight from 40k winds up in Battletech somehow. *JEEZUS*

[Brofisticus]

You know... when some abomination of the warp in 40k wipes out some incalculable quantity of life in some atrocity against reality, it doesn't really mean anything. When a mechwarrior asks the astechs where the bagpipes were coming from, there is a certain awe.

[greygalaxy]

Definitely some kind of extradimensional noneuclidian entity, possessing a Marauder mech. Nobody really understands jumpspace or what is in it. Perhaps, at some point, some where, a group of Star League scientists plunged too far and too deep and found something dark staring back at them from the abyss.

Drums, drums in the deep... The shadow moves in the darkness.

[cropathfinder]

I got a BM story, this comes from a friend who did a semi homebrewed RP set in BT universe in the years after tukayyid.
The PC mercs along with some others and reborn star league forces were involved in a series of batchalls vs combined JF/Jaguar/Shark forces (tho the latter were still severly weakened and even down to using IS mechs) on nameless planet that got depopulated during the succession wars.
During some of the early battles clanners started raising hell about a violation of the terms of the batchall and "cowardly attacks outside the agreed parameters ", some other claims were alarming for them like claiming that IS used chemical weapons, this actually caused the fighting to be paused in order to investigate the locations where the claims were made. Well the joint groups doing that started getting attacked and as usual both sides blamed the other for interfering and soon the battles kept going.
Here i have to add that according to my friend who was the DM that the players were newbies to the setting and thus while he did drop hints they likely didn't know of the mythical status of this beast. So he actually had a an old mechwarrior sort of drop a distorted campfire tail of the discovery of the black marauder and its first pilot.
But yeah that pilot would soon get killed and attacks by a mysterious machine intensified but what was strange was that reports kept coming in about this unknown attacker specifically targeting marauders and its succesors and variants like MII oh and mad cats. In fact the few times the groups it attacked managed to react and get a solid lock to return fire they noticed teh attacker ignored all of them seemingly focusing on said machines. It only got creepier after this as isolated lances started just getting wiped out with one common element being that they all were heavier ones and had atleast one marauder. To make it weirder in some situations the data recovered from battle computers made it seem almost like the marauder suddenly attacked its lancemates, while in others there was no marauder to be found but there were what appeared to be marks of the marauders being dragged off like it was pulled by somethings.
At this point everyone even the clanners were getting spooked and/or tired of this shit and a truce was called to combine forces and hunt this attacker down using the mechs it seemed to focus on as bait.
It worked except what attacked the task force was something else, 8 marauders, pitch black in color except they were not just simple marauders. They were frankenmarauders combining the torso of marauder with various components from related mechs.
For example one of them had 8 standard marauder arms with two at teh side and 4 in the usual position just parted. Another one carried and AC20 instead of one of its arms with other being a mad cat arm and a clan gauss set above its cockpit.
The combat was insane with the combined clan/IS task force losing 52 mechs out of 60 and countless other assets as well to put down those 8 marauders which were insanely durable and their performance was far above any marauder their wrecks needing to be blasted apart for them to stop trying to attack. Once it was over IT appeared on a ridge and what could only be described as a "maniacal laughter " could be heard seeming coming straight trough the PCs neural helms.

[supsup]

Funny enough, if this last story had been 40k, it wouldn't really have been scary. But in Batteltech? Oh, hell no!

[PaganPilot]

You also have deep periphery folklore about aliens in jump space, the Aquila-class "Philadelphia" jumpship, genecaste, greenghosts, Minnesota Tribe (Clan Wolverine survivors ) and Wobbie planets hidden with in jumpspace too.

[Prich]

The scariest thing about Necromo Nightmare isn't the Broken. It's the fact that the story features an honest to god zombie plague that ended the world, and like Sci said, the story is canon...
God, Kerensky, anyone save us...

[mauserkar]

Black Marauder sure feels like a guest from another famous tabletop universe. More like... I dunno... Something, an entity rather than a person, an object or a glitch.

I mean, it practically turns your jumps into Warp-travel with entailing shenanigans: fear, anxiety and an unhealthy dose of insanity. It doesn't need to have claws and tentacles to have: "DEMON" written on its side in big red letters.

[elchjol]

I think I encountered a pair of pilotless mechs in HBS's battle tech once. They engaged me in combat like normal but nether took any pilot damage from knockdowns, torso breaks/ammo blowouts or cockpit hits. Over all it was kinda weird just a pair of Green painted Orion Heavy mechs that interrupted a fight I was in with pirates. I also happen to use a green and white paint scheme so it was a bit odd to see similarly painted mechs shooting at both me and the opfor and their faction symbol was just a question mark. Oh and there was a Double heat sink in the loot pool after the battle. It might have been a bugged fight or I might have got jumped by Star League ghost mechs. Ether way I got a double heat sink from it.

[Real_Iron_Smith]

That's horrifying, but given the kinds of stories we share IRL, I feel this not only doesn't break the setting... it makes it feel more Human.