This book is good for a Battletech fan. Ive been roleplaying in the Battletech universe on and off for years. The combat rules are balanced nicely. The reason I give it a 3 instead of a 4 is due to how unsupported the book is. There are no adventuring material to find online or anything other than lore. There is tons of lore. However, the lore is based on certain time periods rather than specific operations. You can buy books that show you famous battles and how to play them yourself using miniatures and some extra source books for battletech the turn based war game. Yet these do not provide roleplay opertunities. Although I can get pople to play time of war, they are always battletech fans who also roleplay with no newcomers. Perhaps as people warm to science fiction roleplay as they have been doing then there will be more need for a more fully fleshed RPG which could then feed back into the franchise. If playin with the wargame rules I suggest delving into the Chaos Campaign rules. This is great for a DM as it can structure where the next battle is coming from.

This gets a 4/5 because although the presentation and stats are great, the lore is only good. In order to use this product as a place for fantasy adventurers from Dungeons and Dragons to end up in (which is the best use of this product) the book does not setup any continuation with the world the fantasy characters are from. Instead they are thrust into an ongoing storyline between the fantasy and futuristic populations. Although the writers do not know the setting you have been using, they could at least allow for some ideas on how the players ended up in this world that is spelled out rather than a muddle of lore that is not well explained. After reading the lore, I was still unsure of where the fantasy characters were from. Yes there are good and evil portals, but only intense rereading and rewriting could make this a digestable world for a dungeon master. A competant dungeon master could mould this setting into something useful. And it gets a 4 and not a 3 because it is undeniably the best I have seen of future melded with fantasy in the roleplay universe. We need this in order to give variety to our sessions and to explore new frontiers, although my advice to other dungeon masters is that fantasy should still be on the tables.