Gunstar Green wrote:But the original Battletech series is really awesome, the Michael Stackpole authored novels being my favorites.
The Stackpole ones were my favorites as well, and Loren L. Coleman did a good job too. I was really happy with the overall quality of the series, despite there being so many writers. There were a couple of novels I thought were bland (mostly the ones under the MechWarrior label), but only one I seriously disliked. And apparently I wasn't the only one thinking that, since even FASA at the time apparently said something to the effect of "It's canon, but we will never talk about this and never do this again" about it.
Yet oddly Stackpole's Ghost War, which is the first in the Dark Ages novels, I thought was pretty bad.
MrPopo wrote:I think Dark Age would have worked better if it had been a gradual transition to it, like working through the Jihad, then into the post-Jihad era. It was the jump from FedCom civil war to Dark Age all at once that makes it feel really divorced.
It was a huge jump indeed, there's a lot of stuff that were left open after EndGame. Maybe they were only covered in source books for the original tabletop game, like the Jihad itself? I've been reading about those at BattleTechWiki, even just the summaries they have help a lot in bridging the gap and makes Dark Ages feel a bit more connected to the original novels, at least to me.
I'm reading through The Proving Grounds trilogy at the moment and it's pretty decent, I think. The best ones so far in Dark Ages, anyway.
