History
In the BattleTech fiction, the Clans are an extremely aggressive and warlike society founded on selective breeding and ritualized warfare.
The origins of the Clans are described as beginning with the fall of the fictional Star League. The Star League, described as a utopian civilization spanning thousands of human-colonized star systems, is depicted as dissolving as a result of the assassination of its fictional hereditary ruler, First Lord Richard Cameron, and a subsequent coup d'état. The resulting war left the military arm of the Star League, the Star League Defense Force ("SLDF"), caught between the various noble houses of the Inner Sphere vying for control of the disintegrated Star League. Instead of participating in these conflicts, SLDF General Aleksandr Kerensky chose to depart from the Inner Sphere and known space. In year 2784 of the BattleTech timeline, he led most of the Star League Defense Force and their families beyond the borders of the Periphery: the edge of known space in the BattleTech universe.
Within the BattleTech fiction, the long journey of Kerensky and his followers is termed "the Exodus" and ends with the discovery of five marginally habitable worlds depicted as being located deep within the Milky Way galaxy, termed "the Pentagon Worlds". However, the former-SLDF quickly found itself ill-suited to the task of colonization. With too many soldiers and too few support personnel, General Kerensky decided to discharge most of his military personnel from service. In order to determine who would be discharged and who would remain under arms, General Kerensky set up a series of challenges and war-games. The top performers were kept on as professional military personnel and the rest were discharged as civilians. These contests foreshadow the ritualized warfare of the Clan society depicted in much of the BattleTech fiction.
Nevertheless, the society of the Pentagon Worlds is depicted as falling prey to the same infighting that had torn apart the Star League, forcing Aleksandr's son Nicholas Kerensky to conduct a "Second Exodus" to a nearby star cluster with a handful of military personnel and dedicated followers. Nicholas' followers eventually settled on a planet that his mother, Katya Kerensky, named Strana Mechty (described in-universe as Russian for "Land of Dreams"). Nicholas is depicted as having used this planet as a base to build up an invasion force to retake the Pentagon Worlds and, in so doing, completely rebuilt his followers' society to create "the Clans". The actual formation of the Clans is described as resulting from the distribution of 800 warriors still loyal to the Kerenskys and 600 civilian families evenly among 20 newly-founded Clans. Notably, Nicholas is described as instituting a eugenics program, whereby each warrior became the progenitor of a "bloodname" and "bloodline", thereby contributing his or her genes to a Clan-wide artificial breeding program. The products of this system form the backbone of the Clan military. Additionally, the Clans are depicted as having developed a caste-system with these genetically-enhanced soldiers placed at the top, and beneath them various scientist, merchant, technician and laborer castes. In the BattleTech lore, Nicholas soon returned to the Pentagon Worlds with his Clans and retook them from their inhabitants, who in that time had been reduced to banditry, cultism, and savagery.
Over the next several centuries, the Clans are described as gradually increasing in strength, colonizing new worlds, and developing new technologies. Nevertheless, their environment remains depicted as a harsh one. The fictional "Kerensky Cluster", which formed the core of their space, is many jumps worth of jump drive travel from the Inner Sphere, and is represented as being totally cut off from it. Depicted as a means to reduce collateral damage to their fragile and limited infrastructure, the Clans soon developed rules of ritualized combat and warfare to avoid damaging vital resources and harming civilians. These rules are a key feature of BattleTech lore. Nevertheless, partly as a result of the Clan breeding program, these rules were paired with a ruthless level of martial training, resulting in both an extremely warlike culture and superbly capable warriors. In year 3049 of the BattleTech timeline, the Clans are depicted as finally returning to conquer the Inner Sphere after two and a half centuries of expansion, preparation, and planning.
Since their introduction in the fiction, a number of the original clans have been destroyed, reformed, or otherwise lost; three clans were absorbed by others (Clans Widowmaker, Mongoose, Burrock), two were annihilated (Clans Wolverine and Smoke Jaguar), one abjured from Clan society (Clan Nova Cat), one was split into two (Clan Wolf), and two eventually merged with Inner Sphere nations (Clans Ghost Bear and Snow Raven).
Read more about this topic: Clan Jade Falcon
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