Clan Wolverine

Clan Wolverine

Clan Wolverine (also known as The Not Named Clan by Clanners and people among Clanners who don't want an Elemental knuckle sandwich) is one of the big mysteries of the BattleTech universe. This Clan is notable for being officially disgraced and destroyed early in the history of the Clans for apparently letting arrogance drive them into committing war crimes. In reality, while they were aggressive nonconformists, they were framed as a scapegoat and the truth is much more complex.

Origins in Clan Space

McEvedy, McEvedy. There's no one like McEvedy...

Like the other Clans, Clan Wolverine was put together in 2807 from those SLDF forces which went with Nicholas Kerensky to Strana Mechty in the Second Exodus instead of engaging in the Pentagon Civil War. In this case, Sarah McEvedy, a reformist, was installed as Khan and who'd develop issues with the way Nicky did things. During Operation KLONDIKE the Wolverines invaded the planet Circe, where she pushed against the limited rules of engagement by taking a flexible and liberal interpretation of Clan combat rules such as artillery barrages and mass targeting to overcome overwhelming enemy numbers over one-on-on dueling. Tensions would continue to grow from there. After the Pentagon Worlds were taken by the Clans, she allowed a greater degree of mobility between the Castes increasing food production in the territory that was portioned out to the Wolverines, which was seen as as a threat to Nicholas' new vision. Additionally, the clan began creating new BattleMech designs that were more competitive than the SLDF vintage that most Clans had; making many of them feel threatened.

It should be noted that McEvedy and the Wolverines were not the only people among the Clans which harbored doubts about the rather extreme course things had taken though she was the most brazen about it. While some Clans, such as the Sea Foxes, did have less rigid hierarchies and enabled modest caste transfers, Warriors still remained firmly in control. The biggest issue as far as Kerensky was concerned would be the Wolverines rallying the dissenters and threatening the society which he was forming. As such, he had the Wolverines singled out for daring to openly challenge his new vision on society and permitted the other Clan Khans to spy on them. This only made matters worse with mutual animosity rising and taking place of the listlessness that most Clansmen faced with no external enemies left in Clan space.

The final straw which broke the camel's back was that a cache of SLDF equipment including Nuclear Weapons was found in Wolverine Territory. McEvedy wanted to keep these for herself while the other Clanners wanted in on them. There was a Trial of Refusal, the Wolverines lost. Never the less, McEvedy refused to give up the nukes and fought to keep them. Knowing that a Trial of Absorption was all but guaranteed with every Clan out to attack them until they were worn ragged, McEvedy began planning contingencies. On October 11th, 2823 she denounced Nicky in the Grand Council, declared independence and stormed off.

Annihilation

A civil war broke and Clan Snow Raven's capital city was destroyed with a nuclear warhead; damaging their genetic repository. Officially, Clan Wolverine detonated nuclear weapons on pro-Kerensky civilians out of spite in their own capital just as the IlKhan was within range as an observer for the Trial of Absorbtion. They then apparently launched nukes at Clan Snow Raven due to being their closest neighboring Clan. Unofficially, the Clan Widowmaker Khan (who held a personal grudge against the Wolverines since their early days over some personal slight) framed them by detonating a hidden nuke. The Snow Raven disaster was sadly an accident from a warhead-laden aerospace fighter being hit while targeting the Wolverines amidst the chaos in retaliation for the apparent nuking of civilians; resulting in the nuke veering off-target.

Seeing how the apparent nuclear attacks violated the Clan taboo of avoiding collateral damage to useful civilians, an assassination attempt at IlKhan Nicholas himself, and poisoning a Clan’s genes with WMD’s (i.e. a genocide), Clan Wolverine was marked as irredeemable and Nicky was provoked into escalating the Absorption into a Trial of Annihilation against them. Fighting was brutal with both sides engaged in a genocidal total war. No quarter was offered for warriors while Wolverine civilians would be sterilized at best to avoid “tainting the gene-pool.”

They put up a good fight but the Wolverines were outnumbered 19-1 and the rest of the Clans were not holding back. Despite this, the Wolverine's plans were not to stand and fight but rather to flee. Fearing that it would come to this, McEvedy had prepared a fleet for evacuation beforehand and managed to get much of her people, gear, and population off world after a scorched earth campaign in what was called Operation SWITCHBACK. Much of that was destroyed at a world named Babardos. At the end of the battle, the Widowmaker Khan later got secretly executed by the Wolverines SaKhan, Franklin Hallis, with tacit approval from Kerensky (who merely wanted to absorb rather than annihilate the Wolverines as a lesson) in a secluded encirclement by the other Clans' Khans before being executed himself. After the Widowmaker duplicity was exposed to the Clan's top leaders, Kerensky erased the Widowmaker Khan’s genes from their eugenics program and enacted a coverup to avoid something on par with the Wars of Reaving tearing Clan Space apart. But Wolverine survivors managed to regroup and flee towards the Inner Sphere as planned.

Aftermath

To the Clans, the Wolverines became a cultural anathema. Most records were destroyed and what remained was a mostly mythologized account of the Wolverines’ betrayal of the Clans and everything they stood for; seeking to fall back into the ways which laid waste to both the Inner Sphere and Star-League-In-Exile while willing to burn anyone in their way like the original SLDF’s meltdown in the Pentagon Civil Wars. Calling a Clanner a Wolverine is like calling the great grandchild of a Holocaust Survivor a Nazi, now imagine that said person was also raised to be a warrior in a highly militarized honor culture in which the approved way of solving disputes is trial by combat. When the Clans began building IIC variants of the Wolverine model of BattleMech (a time tested medium design that been in production for more than two centuries prior to the Exodus that just happened to be named after the same overgrown weasel), they renamed it the Conjurer. Much of what remained of Clan Wolverine was gobbled up by Clan Wolf. Ironically, the less rigid interpretation of caste mobility (with transfers of those tested and deemed competent), some of their economic reforms, and the Wolverine BattleMech designs would also be adopted with some duplicity. In the case of the third point, some of the first OmniMechs, such as the Coyotl and Kingfisher, would be based off of the Clan Wolverine’s Mercury II and Pulverizer. This might have been driven in part by a guilty conscience as the Clans’ leadership knew the truth. In addition, Clan Wolf and the Clan Council would punish the Widowmakers years later for massacring their protesting merchant caste over a trade dispute (and possibly in revenge for escalating things with the Wolverines) with a Trial of Absorption (that ironically killed Nicholas & drove the Wolves into a frenzy that left barely any Widowmaker warriors alive).

While a costly affair in terms of human lives and materiel, the destruction and subsequent anathemization of the Wolverines would be an important step in the consolidation of the Clans. First and most directly it effectively silenced overt opposition to Nicky's new societal model in the remaining 19 Clans. There were still former Star League Clanners at this stage who disagreed with Nicky, including those in positions of power, but after the most brazen display of defiance was stomped out they soon learned to hold their tongues and worked within the system. Additionally the open secret that survivors escaped served as a cultural boogie-man to keep the average Clanner straightened out and in line. For generations which would be born or decanted in Clan Space, the villainy of the Not-Named-Clan would reinforce the social-structure. The Clans are a culture which is based on Traditionalism and a Mythic Narrative; so having a villain who was of the Clans but broke with their traditions was a prime pillar reinforcing that story. In particular driving home the need to both keep with tradition and clamp down against Unclanike heterodoxy. This focus on conformity to Clan Culture served to be a double edged sword that kept the Clan Homeworlds stable while in isolation up until forced adaptation, petty jealousy, and perceived ideological compromises from exposure to Spheroid tactics during the Clan Invasion tore the Clans apart during the Wars of Reaving.

Not Quite Dead

Of course, the story of the Wolverines did not end here. While their territory was conquered and most of their top troops were killed, much of their second line troops and a decent number of civies got away from the reach of their former fellows on what was basically a Third Exodus. But here things get hazy.

Minnesota Tribe

In 2825, some strange guys showed up and began raiding the worlds of the Draconis Combine with advanced WarShips, Aerospace Fighters and BattleMechs. They did not announce who they were, but they did have the insignia of the SLDF's 331st Royal BattleMech Division (Sarah McEvedy's dad's unit) depicting a map of Minnesota which got them the Inner Sphere designation of "Minnesota Tribe". These mysterious attacks drove Coordinator Jinjiro Kurita up the wall before disappearing but not before making him kick off the Second Succession War. These were remnants of Clan Wolverine¹, though their exact aim is unknown. They came in, took resources and political prisoners and then left for parts unknown with unknown aims. Though this series of smash and grabs by strange outsiders one of the mysteries which got ComStar's Explorer Corps was made to solve, ultimately leading to the Clan Invasion. Ironically enough, shortly before the Clan Invasion, the Explorer Corps discovered a BattleMech wreckage-enclosed shrine surrounding the graves of the last Wolverine Khans on Barbados (which has secretly been erased from Clan navigation charts by Nicholas as part of his coverup) that was being occasionally visited by Clan Wolverines’ descendants. While no descendants were encountered, the shrine did give hints to ComStar of the Clans' martial society, their ruthlessness in battle, and the Minnesota Tribe’s origins.

¹ This has been confirmed by the creators

Where are they now?

Exactly what happened to the survivors of Clan Wolverine after the Minnesota incident is unknown, both in universe and real life. Here are some speculations (both Watsonian and Doylist in perspective) on that front...

• They joined up with ComStar and became the core of the religious elements that would be the Word of Blake (basically a conspiracy theory with little merit, but this was the excuse used by the Great Houses to get the Clans to fight the Jihad).
• They became a 32nd Century warrior group called the Fidelis. (Wrong, they are the remnants of the Smoke Jaguars).
• They became the Umayyads in the Castillian cluster (this was a red herring from the Homworld Clan’s rumors that made the Goliath Scorpions get into a tizzy when they conquered the Castilian Cluster. This was later disproven when genetic tests and historical documents showed them to be pre-Clan SLDF holdouts who fled the Pentagon Worlds. Specifically from POW camps nowhere near Wolverine space after being imprisoned during Operation KLONDIKE for refusing to assimilate with Clan culture).
• They died out (technically possible but deeply unsatisfying from a narrative perspective and not likely given their access to Star League terraforming machinery and biotechnology alongside Clan exo-wombs).
• They survived, but fell apart into numerous small groups scattered about the periphery with little if anything remaining of the old identity (possible to some degree, but not likely on a grand scale as the risk of someone spilling the beans on their ancestry grows with the number of bean spillers).
• They settled somewhere in the Deep Periphery after the Minnesota Tribe stint and are laying low, either just trying to live quietly while being left alone or building up and plotting payback (most likely some flavor of this based on novels and short stories).

Notable 'Mechs

• Bull Shark - So far only seen in the 2018 vidyagaem. An Assault-sized brawler with long-ranged sieging capabilities thanks to its back-mounted Thumper Artillery Cannon. It was found inside the Dobrev, an abandoned Wolverine JumpShip found in the Periphery. The Wolf's Dragoons (still in deep cover as Clan agents posing as Mercenaries) tried to destroy it, but whether they succeed or not depends on the player.
• Mercury II - A medium-sized successor to the Mercury recon 'Mech. While it lost nearly a third of the original's speed, it had the best of Star League-era tech, jump jets an extra ER Large Laser. At least one survived the Annihilation and is in the hands of Clan Coyote. Its design served as an inspiration for the first OmniMech, the Coyotl.
• Pulverizer - An assault-sized command 'Mech. Mainly equipped with long-ranged weapons like an Enhanced ER PPC, LRM/10s and 2 Large Lasers. Unlike the other Wolverine designs, this one survived the Annihilation and Clan Snow Raven continued to build them. It was succeeded by the Kingfisher OmniMech.
• Stag - A redesigned Vulcan. Instead of being anti-infantry, it was a cavalry/scout hybrid. It had quite a bite for its size and could run faster than the Vulcan thanks to its MASC. The Stag II variant had a prototype ER PPC for long-ranged combat and replaced the missiles with an extra laser for long-term combat.

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