Tabletop wargame BattleTech is getting its first real alternate universe in its 40 year history, and it's a pretty obvious one: If you have a giant robot, well, why should it not fight a giant monster?

BattleTech: Gothic is an alternate timeline for the world of BattleTech, one where endless and unrestricted warfare among the great houses of the Inner Sphere has led to a scorched human landscape stalked not just by giant mechs, but by Abominations—"horrible creatures of amalgamated flesh and steel."

The world of Gothic will be familiar to BattleTech fans, though changed. It has the same Inner Sphere setting but with the names just a bit altered and the cultures twisted by the horrors of continual warfare—in a way, it seems like this world of BattleTech has been consumed by unrestricted warfare in the way that the default BattleTech setting's noble space-pilots have set up their entire society to avoid.

The first big product release will be some pretty nifty spike-and-organic-bits versions of classic battlemechs in a starter box for Gothic. They're pretty suitable for what [[link]] you'd imagine them to be: Grimmer, more stylized versions of the smoother military machines that hit the field in a normal BattleTech game. Presumably some models of full-on, not just hybrid-mech-looking, Abominations are coming in a future release.

"BattleTech: Gothic is the first release of the Continuum Series. With these releases, we aim to explore different versions of what the BattleTech universe could have been. The [[link]] creative minds behind BattleTech and especially Gothic have plenty of ideas and we can’t wait to share them in the future," says developer Catalyst Game Labs.

The world of BattleTech: Gothic is spearheaded by Herbert A. Beas II, an author who has been involved with BattleTech books in one form or another since the late 1990s.

You can learn more about and download a lore primer on its world .