Diesel Jester Productions

Actually 6 things, as Nos. 4 and 5 illustrate: There always will be typos.

I am go for Tucson Comic-Con! Come see me at Booth AA084 on Labor Day Weekend!

Have you wanted to meet your favorite authors? From BattleTech and Shadowrun to the distant worlds of He Who Fights With Monsters and Quincy's Tavern, you'll be able to meet them all at the Catalyst booth at Gen Con 2026!

Find the full schedule at the link and we'll see you at Booth #1611 soon!

https://bit.ly/CGL-Signing-Schedule-GC26

A writer friend of mine is getting published next year! 😊

RANDALL N. BILLS: The Man Who Kept BattleTech Standing

THE MAN WHO KEPT BATTLETECH STANDING

Randall N. Bills is not easy to summarize as a single kind of game designer.

He is a developer. A fiction editor. A line steward. A board-game designer. A corporate survivor. A continuity keeper. A public ambassador for a setting that has been too large, too old, too beloved, and too complicated to survive by accident.

His central work is BattleTech.

Not because he created it. He did not.

BattleTech already existed before Bills entered the professional story. What he did was different. He helped keep the old machine running when companies collapsed, licenses shifted, formats changed, and the market stopped looking like the one that created the game.

That is not glamorous work.

It is architectural work.

THE FAN WHO WALKED INTO THE FACTORY

Bills came into BattleTech through the path that makes old hobby industries feel almost mythic: first fan, then contributor, then staff, then steward.

The key early story begins in the 1990s, when he met BattleTech line developer Bryan Nystul at Gen Con during a long game of The Succession Wars. Bills was already writing for MechWarrior Quarterly, already deep in the lore, already doing the kind of unpaid fan labor that sometimes becomes a professional audition.

By late 1995, FASA brought him in as an assistant developer.

That job mattered because BattleTech was never only a rules set. It was a rules set tied to fiction, technical readouts, political history, maps, units, faction identities, and arguments from players who knew the universe well enough to catch mistakes.

To work on BattleTech was to work inside a machine with many moving parts.

By 2000, Bills had become BattleTech line developer. He also wrote fiction, including Path of Glory and Imminent Crisis. That combination is important. His authority came from both sides of the franchise: the game table and the setting history.

He understood the units.

He understood the canon.

He understood why players cared if the machine stayed consistent.

THE COLLAPSE AND THE BRIDGE

Then FASA closed.

For many game lines, that would have been the end. BattleTech instead entered one of those strange license eras where the property lived in fragments. WizKids pushed the future of the brand into MechWarrior: Dark Age and collectible pre-painted miniatures. Classic BattleTech survived through FanPro. Fiction continued through new channels. Rights, formats, and fan expectations no longer pointed in one clean direction.

Bills became one of the bridges across that break.

He worked around the WizKids era. He helped preserve continuity. He helped keep the older game alive under the Classic BattleTech banner. When InMediaRes and Catalyst Game Labs became the new home for BattleTech and Shadowrun tabletop publishing, Bills became one of the people carrying institutional memory forward.

That is the first major reason he matters.

A franchise can die even while the name survives.

The title can keep appearing on boxes while the old game becomes unreachable, unsupported, or spiritually replaced. BattleTech did not vanish into that fate. The hex maps, record sheets, technical history, faction politics, and old machines stayed part of the living line.

Bills was not the only reason.

But he was one of the continuity anchors.

THE PROMISE AND PROBLEM OF NO OBSOLESCENCE

BattleTech has a strange design promise: old things still matter.

A player can bring ancient favorite machines to the table and not feel that forty years of releases have rendered them trash. That is rare in miniatures gaming. Many games live by making the new thing better, forcing the old thing off the table. BattleTech has usually resisted that churn.

The cost is complexity.

Bills and the development culture around him leaned into what fans often describe as lateral design. New equipment should not simply erase old equipment. New weapons, armor, engines, and systems should create tradeoffs. More damage might mean more heat. More range might mean more tonnage. A specialized system might be useful in one tactical context and awkward in another.

That philosophy protects collections.

It also grows barnacles.

Because nothing truly replaces anything else, everything has to coexist. New weapons bring new rules. New eras bring new exceptions. New technical solutions create new tables, notes, edge cases, and reference habits.

That is the BattleTech paradox.

The same philosophy that preserves player investment also makes the game harder to enter. The same respect for the old machines can bury new players under decades of machinery.

Bills's legacy lives inside that contradiction. He helped protect a game that refused to abandon its past, and he also helped inherit the burden created by that refusal.

PLASTICS, BOXES, AND THE MODERN TABLE

One of Bills's most important practical achievements was physical, not mechanical.

He fought to bring better plastic miniatures and stronger boxed products back into BattleTech.

That sounds ordinary now because modern tabletop players expect good components. But for BattleTech, it was a serious shift. The franchise had long depended on metal miniatures, cardboard standees, deep books, and a player base willing to do a lot of work before the first shot was fired.

The modern market wanted a different first impression.

Miniatures ready to play.

Boxes that could teach.

A table that looked alive before the rulebook swallowed the evening.

That shift helped prepare the ground for BattleTech's later crowdfunding explosion. The modern plastic lines, starter boxes, force packs, and renewed retail presence did not come from nowhere. They came from years of wrestling the old product model into something that could sit on a modern shelf and invite a new player in.

That is franchise architecture again.

Not just designing rules.

Designing the doorway.

ALPHA STRIKE AND THE SECOND DOOR

Alpha Strike was another answer to the same problem.

Classic BattleTech is detailed, tactile, and slow in a way many fans love. Armor gets marked away. Heat matters. Individual weapons fire. Damage locations create stories. A single lucky shot can change the whole table.

But that richness makes large battles hard.

Alpha Strike takes the same universe and abstracts the combat. Units move faster. Damage resolves faster. Bigger forces fit into a normal session. The game looks more like a modern miniatures battle and less like a forensic study of one machine being dismantled bolt by bolt.

Some veterans resisted that abstraction.

Of course they did. For some players, the granular record sheet is BattleTech.

But Alpha Strike gave the franchise a second door. It let players who loved the mechs, the factions, and the battlefield spectacle enter without immediately accepting the full weight of classic simulation.

That is the pattern of Bills's later stewardship.

Do not burn down the old house.

Build more entrances.

ACES AND THE SOLO TABLE

BattleTech: Aces may be one of the clearest modern examples of that philosophy.

Designed with Josh Durken and developed into boxed campaign play, Aces gives BattleTech and Alpha Strike a card-driven opponent. It supports solo and cooperative play, letting players fight against an AI system instead of needing a human opponent for every game.

That matters because modern hobby life is fragmented.

People have collections but not always regular opponents. They have nostalgia but less free time. They want campaigns, persistence, and story pressure, but they cannot always schedule a full competitive night.

Aces meets that reality.

It turns BattleTech from only a head-to-head wargame into something closer to a cooperative campaign engine. Enemy behavior can be managed by cards. Missions can carry forward. The table can tell a story even when the player is alone.

That is not a small change.

For a franchise built on old-school competitive simulation, solo and cooperative play are not cosmetic additions. They are a way of letting more people actually use the game they love.

THE SHADOWRUN BURDEN

Bills's career is not only BattleTech.

At Catalyst, he also carried executive responsibility around Shadowrun, another enormous FASA-born property with decades of lore, rules, and fan expectations.

Shadowrun is one of the hardest RPGs to manage because it is several games at once. Cyberpunk gunfights. Magic. Metahumans. Hacking. Corporate politics. Street-level crime. Global metaplot. Every edition has to solve the same question: how do you make all of that playable without the rules tearing themselves apart?

Catalyst kept Shadowrun in print, which matters.

But this is also where Bills's public record becomes more complicated.

THE CATALYST CRISIS

In 2010, Catalyst Game Labs became the center of a public financial crisis.

Freelancers and former staff raised serious concerns about unpaid work, royalty issues, financial management, and internal accountability. Some partners cut ties. Some contributors left. Public arguments spread across forums and blogs. The dispute damaged trust between Catalyst and parts of the freelance community.

Bills, as a senior executive and visible company figure, was criticized for his role in trying to keep Catalyst intact and for the leadership choices around that period.

This article will not turn contested forum claims into proven fact.

That boundary matters. The public record contains allegations, partial records, angry testimony, and company survival. It does not give outsiders a clean view of every internal decision.

But the crisis belongs in the story because it shaped how some people read Catalyst afterward. It affected Shadowrun's talent pool. It left long memories among freelancers and fans. It showed the ugly side of licensed tabletop publishing, where beloved games can depend on fragile companies, thin margins, and underpaid creative labor.

The hard truth is that Catalyst survived.

The other hard truth is that survival came with reputational damage.

Both are part of Bills's legacy.

THE OTHER DESIGNER

It would be a mistake to treat Bills only as a BattleTech executive.

His board-game work shows a different side of his design brain.

The Duke is elegant in a way BattleTech is not trying to be. It is an abstract strategy game where wooden tiles show their own movement rules. Move a tile, then flip it. The piece changes what it can do next. The result is a chess-like contest where the board state keeps transforming under the players' hands.

That is clean design.

Jarl reworks that engine through a Viking theme.

Dragonfire goes in the opposite direction: cooperative deck-building, campaign progress, Dungeons & Dragons fantasy, legacy-style character growth, and a party trying to survive escalating encounters. It shows Bills working with modern board-game expectations rather than inherited 1980s simulation.

That range matters because it proves he is not simply a caretaker of old machinery.

He can design small.

He can design modern.

He can design outside BattleTech's gravity.

WHERE HE IS NOW

As of May 2026, Catalyst Game Labs lists Randall Bills as Managing Developer. Recent public coverage and interviews also frame him as a Creative Director and public ambassador for BattleTech.

The current direction of the franchise is almost a summary of his career.

Catalyst has announced a 2026 BattleTech refit with a new Starter Box, Core Box, and Core Rulebook for Gen Con. The company is explicit that this is not a new edition. It is the same game and universe, updated for better presentation and play. Existing maps, technical readouts, and models remain compatible.

That is Bills's design problem in one sentence.

Change enough to welcome people.

Do not change so much that the old machines stop standing.

WHAT HE ACTUALLY BUILT

Randall N. Bills did not create BattleTech.

He did not make every good decision in its history.

He did not avoid every cost of corporate survival.

What he built was continuity under pressure.

He helped BattleTech survive publisher collapse, license fragmentation, collectible-era disruption, component modernization, crowdfunding scale, and the modern demand for faster, friendlier, more flexible play.

He helped keep the old game from being discarded.

He helped build new doors through Alpha Strike and Aces.

He helped prove that a forty-year-old wargame could still grow without pretending to be young.

That is why his career matters.

Some designers create a brilliant mechanism.

Some designers create a famous setting.

Bills did something rarer and messier.

He kept a whole franchise standing long enough for the next generation to find it.

Writer’s Crusade!!! WhoopWoot!