Published Adventure Feedback thread

Infinity The RPG
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There isn’t much information online regarding the published adventures yet and I thought it might be fun to collect our experiences with them here :slight_smile:

I’m currently prepping Code Infinity so unfortunately I can’t share any real feedback yet but as far as free adventures with your GM screens go it looks organized and should hopefully be a fun 1-2 sessions!

For anyone curious about the adventure (spoiler free!) ,

You are sent to uncover and stop a series of high profile assassinations carried out by an unknown individual or group against the Church of Resurrection.

Which adventure are you running and what are your thoughts on it? :slight_smile:

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So my group played through roughly half of the content of E Pluribus Unum (from the Code Infinity book which is apparently NOT the name of the adventure :smiley: )

Spoilers:

The adventure is about a rogue AI out for revenge against the Resurrection Church in Sybaris on NeoTerra. It starts with a series of murders and a suspected group of Lhosts dishing out justice on the high-ranking members of the church.

The players played through most of Scenes 1 and 2, which covers most of the investigation and the assassination attempt on the remaining clergy members.

I feel that the adventure had a great deal of investigative hooks, various locations that the players could make use of to slowly uncover the cause of the murders. They went with filtering through the denied resurrection accounts using a Geist, investigating the living clergy members, looking for Lhost suppliers and analyzing the photograph of the rogue Lhost. Overall I felt that this was ample opportunities to drop at least one clue per scene and they’re well on their way to establishing the link between Esther Grant and the Church.

The assassination attempt was also a very nice and gentle introduction into the trifold combat system of Infinity. Having a single Lhost to fight against showed how strong the characters are, but also how fragile (the Wulver received a Wound with the first attack) they are. I used some Heat to have Esther make dedicated Infowar attacks against the hacker, but she was Breached and Tagged instead which is super cool. Now they know that she’s somewhere in Svalarheima and have something to look forward to.

Overall this is a really nice introduction adventure focusing on the Noir and investigative part of the game and my players had a couple of, “Oooooh.” moments as they played through it which was super fun.

However, the mechanics. My goodness there is a lot to remember. I used both the GM Screen and the Alexandrian cheat sheet and was still lost a lot of the time. Especially concerning Infowar and hacking it was super difficult to make judgement calls I didn’t second-guess. The hacker PC had a lot of programs, but I was never sure about the damage they dealt so I just treated them as basic InfoWar attacks.

I also had concerns when they were in the Church and the PC wanted to fight Esther in the same Quantronic Zone. Technically it’s guarded with a Firewall 10 and an IC (Sub-Level 1 of the church), did that mean he first had to hack into the network to be able to fight Esther? He also wanted to create a backdoor in the mainframe and I kinda let him after a difficult hacking attempt because it felt boring to have the players watch him reroll ten times to finally bypass the firewall and inflict a Breach. It was very confusing.

Using the Infinity points felt too easy I suppose. In return they didn’t have enough opportunities to generate Momentum so they kept paying Heat to me. In the end they used almost all of their Infinity points (12 points for four players) and I had so much Heat I didn’t really know what to do with. Honestly, the 12 starting Heat would have been more than enough already.

What did work really well was using a Metanoia effect against a particularly stubborn NPC. Instead of giving him a very high difficulty the group worked together to inflict a Metanoia effect to Force an Action and they explicitly mentioned how nice that felt which is cool.

One particular thing a player mentioned was trying to grapple a foe. I was looking for a Momentum spend or an action she could use and we ended up using the rules to knock a foe unconscious instead. Looking back I know I should have said that she could grapple someone using one or two momentum spends, but those rules are also weirdly absent. Maybe it’s just a D&D thing where every edition has grappling rules, but this time I actually missed having them.

tl;dr the adventure is solid and I can recommend it (so far) for newbies getting started with Infinity. The rules on the other hand are simple to learn but have so many facets it’s difficult to judge when to use what.

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Make an unarmed attack (basic attack), but don’t use the “Stun” quality, use “Immobilizing” quality instead. That way a target can become Hindered or even Stuck (which is effectively an applied grappling submission hold).

Or make a non-lethal attack and use Knockout as Wound effect, if you manage to cause a wound, but describe this kind of Knockout as a submission hold incapacitating the target.

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I have to say this is one of the things I love about the 2D20 system. Just last week, my players decided to grapple an opponent. Several jokes started flying over Skype immediately about “Oh no, we need to look up the rules for grappling!” I actually started to look through the book for a moment…

But then I stopped and said nope! It’s just a Harm effect like anything else! Roll your damage! So simple! It also worked out perfect in the scene. In subsequent turns I simply said that the opponent who was grappled needed to roll an Athletics test to break free. (Basically this was the same as the Absterge action, I just used it for Athletics instead). And my players spent heat to make it a face-to-face roll to keep him held in position. Worked awesome!

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Currently I have run one book adventure and I’m in the middle of my second adventure. I’ll give what feedback I can for the moment.

The first adventure I ran was from “Adventures in the Human Sphere”. I ran the first adventure in this series, “Operation: Honeywasp”.

Overall, I have to say this adventure didn’t go over very well. These adventures in this book are made to run quickly, but I found that there wasn’t enough information in them to actually run them very fast. They require a GM actually spend quite a bit of prep-time fleshing out the adventure ideas, or require the GM to do a lot of improvising and nudging the characters in the right direction.

When I ran Honeywasp we were mostly doing it to get a feel for the 2D20 rules so I really didn’t do much prep, and ended up improvising quite a bit.

To give you an idea of the issue, Honeywasp gives the players 6 objectives to fulfill across Acontecimento. Some of these objectives don’t have much more information than a paragraph on what the players will encounter. Some of the objectives have a small but decent amount of information. Most of the objectives eventually hint at what is to come in the finale of the adventure after the objectives are completed.

I found that my players got bogged down in some of the very minor objectives. So I was making up NPCs and locations constantly. I would try to nudge them that they were making things more complicated than necessary, but they didn’t always take the hint.

Because of how I ran the adventure, I don’t think I spent enough time sprinkling hints about how the finale was going to go down. As a consequence, the players almost completely missed it, and I had to really lead them by the nose during the finale.

Operation: Honeywasp isn’t BAD, but I definitely recommend treating it more like an adventure that needs the blanks filled in before you start running it.

I am also currently running Quantronic Heat. My players have gotten through Chapter 1. They’re currently on a side mission, and then I’m planning on continuing Chapter 2.

So far I’m really liking Quantronic Heat. Chapter 1 actually went REALLY well. My players did a great job with the investigation, and the action scene at the end kept them interested and engaged. Chapter 1 has a pretty good example of Info War laid out, with a nice diagram of the scene. The scene itself is a bit complicated for plot reasons, so it’s not a SIMPLE hack, but it’s pretty nice how they laid it out, so I appreciated that. My players totally went for it, and they really enjoyed the hacking part.

Chapter 2 of Quantronic Heat is mostly Psywar so I’m interested to see how that ends up going for them.

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The players in my ongoing campaign (non-Infinity) have managed to turn what should have been a simple fight scene into a full investigative adventure. So I feel your pain …

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